Live Music

 

It all changed when I met a beautiful girl at the youth club. Her parents were professional musicians; her dad played keyboards and led a trio that played all over the county, and mum was a violinist who played with the BBC Bristol Symphony Orchestra.

 

My now-girlfriend invited me to her house one evening not realising it was the same night her dad had called a band rehearsal. The house was a small post war semi, one of four on a cul-de-sac in a green part of town. A path that passed the front of the house led through to the town football club. Semi-detached on the first floor only, an archway at street level led to garages behind all four homes. Inside it was of-its-time, with a lounge and dining room and kitchen downstairs, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

 

When I arrived the rehearsal was about to start. The drummer, a slight man, had set up his kit under the stairs in the hallway. This was to help control the sound and leave room to move through the house. My girlfriend’s dad, a short well-built man with presence, sat in the lounge in his upholstered fireplace chair with his accordion which he rehearsed on as they waited for the last of the trio, the double bass, to arrive.

The double bass was late; he came into the house carrying a very large wooden plank that he placed on the carpeted floor in the middle of the dining room behind my girlfriend’s dad’s chair. He brought it to protect the carpet and without it my girlfriend’s mum would never have let him into her house. He went out again to get his double bass. He screwed on the silver support spike to the bottom of the bass and then stood it on the centre of the plank. He was a tall well-built man who reached easily over the top of the bass, and with a nod from him they started to play.

 

The trio mostly played 1950s popular music, the sort that people could eat to, or could dance to, in the hotels where they regularly gigged. Then at the end of the rehearsal, they launched into their own favourite music, the jazz of Dave Brubeck, Django Reinhardt and Ella Fitzgerald. The sound of the music was like a heavy slap on the ear for me. It woke me up as if I had been asleep for all of my life so far. It gripped me, an experience I’d never had before. The whole house vibrated. I felt it in my body, and if I hadn’t been an immaturely young teenager, I’d have said it touched my soul - not just the physical vibration but the subtlety of the sound from the three happy musicians, that filled the whole house, and me.

 

The feeling I experienced in that house has never left me, and neither has the beautiful girl who invited me there fifty-seven years ago.