“Okay, Dave,” I said, “what’s the gent on your case look like when he’s on your case?”
“Man, I’m sitting here rapping with you and he’s making the scene.”
“He’s in the club now?”
“Would I shuck you?”
“Suppose not.”
I started to turn my head for a survey of the room.
“Don’t avert your eyes, man,” Dave said.
Avert? Was that a piece of hip phraseology I’d missed out on? I left my eyes on Dave.
“The dude’s sitting at the bar,” Dave said. “I’ll give you the word when to peek. Far end of the bar.”
Dave’s off-centre eye alignment must have yielded an edge in the vision department. He didn’t have to avert his eyes to sneak a peek.
“Go, man,” Dave said.
I turned my head. The bar ran along the back of Chase’s. Photographs of musicians who’d worked the room over the years hung on the wall behind the bar. The club was three-quarters full, a very good house for a Wednesday night. I glanced to the end of the bar long enough to register the man sitting on the last stool. He had on a beige jacket and was drinking a glass of beer. He was looking straight ahead toward the bandstand. Not for long. His head twitched in the direction of Dave and me. I turned back to Dave. The beige jacket I was sure of. The guy may also have had thinning hair and a small moustache.
“Man in the beige jacket,” I said to Dave.
“Bald dude,” Dave said.
Ah.
“Got a moustache,” Dave said.
Double ah. The powers of observation remained intact.
“The jacket,” I said, “with it, he’ll stand out in a crowd.”
Dave’s expression didn’t change, but his voice edged up a notch in volume. “This mean you’re in, man?” he said.
“I’ll follow your buddy, Dave. But before we decide the next move from there, we regroup for further strategy.”
“Mellow.”
“Right, Dave.”
Dave Goddard was a man locked into the late 1940s. His language. His clothes. His music. He blew the tenor saxophone the way Stan Getz and Zoot Sims blew theirs in Woody Herman’s orchestra when it was called the Four Brothers Band. That was 1948. Getz and Sims let their styles evolve over the years. Dave held firm with his. His sound was light and feathery, and he shaped his solos in graceful little arcs. Dave hadn’t seemed to notice the passing of the last four decades. But his playing kept him employed. Maybe it was his Canadian origins. That was quaint for a jazz musician.
When I was a kid, I heard Dave play at concerts and clubs around town. Dave was a Toronto guy. His playing used to send little thrills through me. It still did. When Montreal was the hot Canadian jazz city, Dave lived there. All the clubs booked him. Same with Vancouver. Sometimes things broke exactly right for Dave and he toured Europe and Japan, played clubs in California and Manhattan. Usually he went as a sideman in somebody else’s group, somebody with a big name. Dave could always fit in.
He wasn’t an anachronism, more like a man who’d found the perfect year and decided to cling to it. Dave’s year happened to be 1948. I’d have to ask him where he found the Mr. B shirts in 1989.
“Hold tight till one bell, man,” Dave said.
He wanted me to wait until one o’clock.
It was time for the last set of the night. Dave stood up and walked toward Chase’s tiny bandstand. When Dave walked, he took long, deliberate strides. His body moved in sections.
The waiter in the stained red jacket chugged back to the table. He was carrying a glass Silex coffee pot.
“Too late for Mr. Dave?” he asked.
“Beats me.”
2
THE QUINTET played “Milestones” first, then a ballad, “I Remember Clifford”.
Dave Goddard wasn’t the leader on the job. Harp Manley was. Harp was a short rotund man in his mid-sixties. He had skin the colour of a football, and he was experiencing a renaissance. He played trumpet in the manner of the man remembered in the ballad, Clifford Brown. Harp blew fast and fat. That took technique. Most bebop trumpet players, which was what Harp was, had small tones and spattered notes like pellets from a BB gun. There were exceptions. Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Harp Manley. Clifford and Fats died young. Harp was still with us and recently prospering.
He’d sunk from view for most of the 1960s and 1970s. He lived in Amsterdam and worked the clubs and festivals in Europe, the odd date back home in New York. Bebop always had a small audience. It changed for Harp when Martin Scorsese cast him in a movie. Harp played a retired Harlem pimp. He turned out to be as controlled an actor as he was a jazz musician, and he won an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He didn’t get the Oscar, but the attention put his musical career in the hot category. Harp probably didn’t think of it that way. He was blowing the way he’d always blown. The difference was more people were paying to listen.
Harp made another movie. It was set for a world premiere in Toronto during the week he was at Chase’s Club. I read about the movie in a profile of Harp in that morning’s Globe and Mail. Mark Miller wrote the profile, best jazz critic in the city. He didn’t have a lot of competition. Harp played a Philadelphia cop in the movie. According to Mark Miller, advance word had it that Harp established himself as more than a one-role wonder.
In the meantime, he was touring with a small band that had three young black guys from New York in the rhythm section. In Toronto, Harp added an extra horn to the group’s front line. The extra horn was Dave Goddard on tenor saxophone.
The quintet finished the set with a Thelonious Monk tune, “Well You Needn’t”. Dave’s solo was a marvel of gentle curves.
“Lovely stuff, Dave,” I said when he came back to the table next to the door into the kitchen.
“You ready, man?”
I guessed Dave was too distracted to absorb the compliment.
“More or less,” I said.
Dave had his tenor saxophone in his right hand, its case in his left. He sat down across the table from me. The saxophone was a Selmer and looked like it had been with Dave for all his years in the jazz life. Its brass colour was dull and scuffed, and elastic bands were wrapped around four or five of the valves. The case was a different proposition. It was spiffy and gleaming black, fresh from the store. Dave fitted the saxophone into the case. He took the strap from around his neck, draped it over the saxophone, and snapped shut the case.
“This shadow job,” I said, “where’s the first stop?”
I felt like an idiot talking about shadow jobs. More G. Gordon Liddy than Philip Marlowe.
Dave said, “Place where I’m staying? That part’s a touch, man. Six, seven blocks down the street. We can stroll it. Me, the dude, and you.”
“In that order.”
“To the Cameron.”
“The Cameron House’s where you have a room?”
I went into my astonished expression. It involved a drooping