Miles couldn't source the melody when it came to him — another line straight outta major blues, but he could blow with ease around it. The rehearsal had only just started. The new horn was breaking in. Maybe the quartet was the way to go again he thought, like all them years before... Everyone was blowing off the vamp. Something about the second horn compressed everything else, forcing everyone into shorter routines and less solos — the new horns all wanna solo to the end, covering as much ground as they can in the first weeks, cutting mettle.

A huge score was arranged in front of him in bits and pieces over two stands, long sheets folded many times and flagging at the ends. He was jotting a few chorus lines with a grubby pencil, lead lines based on progressions that weren't swing any more but open and somewhat unfinished. Parts for the new tenor who was talking with the others out back between takes, smoking and laughing while he wrote, having herded them out to get some space. A bit of testiness with the piano player — a slightly off-colour remark of deference addressed sideways, which Miles had stared at.

He crossed out and made gruff corrections in a bolder hand, now cutting and redirecting parts to other sections. The empty drums were furthest in front of him, bass and piano in the round with the horns miked facing them, just the way he liked to rehearse and draw out new material. Walking over to the piano, he tinkled a voicing and pencilled it for the new horn, scrolling, fa da faradarada on the descending. Cutting, labelled C on the paper, with lines to the first ten bars, he pasted the line in response to the 8-note bass call. Replayed a chord, thought about the chorus and made more changes to the piano script wishing someone would notate all these ideas for him, clean up the mess. Some pretty little secretary or something.

He stood up and straightened ready for a walk, feeling for his cigarettes just as the boys came back in ready for work. Indignant, annoyed, as though somehow fresh air was exactly what he needed and missed out on now, he sat down on the stool again and roped the pianist through his part, then voiced with his mouth and pointings to the score the new tenor part, who took it in at a scoop and played the suggestion of openness behind it. OK. Miles dragged the paper back to his stand and taking up the horn counted in the first bass bars, sat down on the lean-to, cued the others and listened some. Cigarettes left on the piano lid. Bright music filled the high room with an energy and interest; all the attentions were drawn.

As they blew through the chorus again, Miles thought the unit still sounded full or in need of trimming, too much fat on the gristle somehow. The new voice was good but not yet right for the role of the score — and it wasn't the others — the horn hadn't assimilated with the group. Something lacking in the vibe, some residual hesitancy in pace or the changes between scales — or a mocking unwillingness to take on the score and work through it. The picture wasn't happy yet; the kind of happy that had a string of anguish lining it, as always.

Miles realised, in a flash, that he missed the phrasings of Cannonball... so much like the human voice, seeming to say things. He stopped them with a sour horn blast. The line, the notes, he said, have to slur right on their tails before moving to the next. The gaps are big enough, they gotta sound like words. Like this.

The deliciously accommodating ring of her cunt tightly circumnavigated his cock, first tight then warming and loosening with movement and ease, receptively swelling with sensation. At first Miles had the perennial chords on his mind, the funky deep ghost-rhythms around a major E, but these drifted away as new waves crashed upon his midriff, slowly immersing the rest of him.

Returning his breath to the rhythm he withdrew slowly in mid-position, knelt first away and then closer to her organ and gave it a close looking into. Which was breathing slightly, with small, flowerlike movement of petals, all shiningly swollen with colour and unadorned 'cept for a triangular blade of black reaching up and away from the mound of her clit. She asked him 'what'. He answered 'you' and 'stay'. She raised her head and smirking also lifted her legs saying 'here' and clasped knees in arms. Miles' eye was bleary from heat and the blood rushing his lowered head. He inspected. He contemplated. He took mental notes by the thousand and discarded them all. He thought how the darkest skin can hide the deepest rose. He thought of God and Soul and Sex in a single thought and let it drift from his mind again, swayed by the aromatic speculation of her lips, her wings, her roundly crenulated portcullis. She was waiting.

Her lips spread wide and free from the bottom but quickly coalesced to an upward curve of dark crimson, hiding an inner deeper lightness; and at the top seemed to reach and cross the line like an incursion, the line which ran from navel to ass like an infinitely stable hemisphere. Under her button of clit they resolved again into a hidden mystery probed by fingers and tongue alike — finely accommodating now closing lips — a feast for eyes rolling up and down the axis. He tried to think with all the flowering directive of idea, in full face of this cornucopic sculpture of rosy flesh, think of a name for her, a keyhole mnemonic coding her full tenor of skin, aura, comfort, extension, scope, timbre and dusky gradations and humour and inclination and sheer immersion...

And then turning herself over and hugging the sheets she verbally craved his return, by which, stamping her character on the memory, he came back.

It wasn't so much that the noise was all around, all around his head and the room, but Miles was hearing rhythm in everything. The honk of taxis through the window, the skank of the elevator engine nearby, and the plumbing shaking with occasion vibration. He reasoned that the room, or rather the loft, because of its age, warranted some excuse. But this was the first time, sitting and posing on a kind of square black pedestal, that he felt the occasionally dissonant incursion of silence into the steady background noise of the building, the room, the clay that she was bashing modelling and scraping into a likeness of himself. And that silence could move in rhythms.

His bleary eye was staring at her with the kind of mocking concentration that comes with agreeing to something he'd ordinarily never let himself do, but which this woman had sewn up in minutes. And she, naked, was regarding him with an equally abstract fixative eye, now at the head of clay, now regarding the lines of Miles, ignoring and seeing all of him from shoe to shirt to late night shave — but never really in contact. He had agreed to the bet of this Village chicken, to sit while she modelled 'that fine head o'yooors' on condition she do it completely unclothed — so he could look at her between cigarettes, or maybe because he was cold and wanted the heater on some, which she of course had to fire up to even get down. Which made Miles smile. But she was silent the whole time and never asked him to move or tilt this way and that to suit perspective or whatever. She did all the moving behind her clay.

Somewhat an artist she styled herself, with a loft in the 40s with plants and books and prints everywhere, a couch in front of some idiotic sculpture all black and primitive like a joke outta Egypt. But with otherwise none of the pretentious bullshit that rolls offa the artistic types from the lower East side, no jimmy jam jargon or airs or scarves. Miles stopped drumming his fingers and lit another. Uncrossed his legs, recrossed them the other way. The way she just kept silently working the clay. He started hearing things. The building coming at him from all angles as if forcing the sound of his thinking back on himself.

The silences weren't just broken interrupted, they were the problem. They were nagging him about something. He looked at her unconscious interaction with the clay, the ungainly movement of her limbs and the unusual approach backwards and forwards, never saying a word but always (for once!) subjecting him to the silences. He smiled, bemused, when not long before she had been the loud one. Her bubs swung as she came at the clay again. It's going to be something mightily abstract when finished, he thought.

She looked, breathed and considered for a minute; Miles looked, considered as the smoke angled out and downwards from his nose. For a second, again, all the noise of traffic and piping stopped.

'I saw you play,' she broke in at last, 'two nights ago.'

She looked at him clearly and direct now.

'So why you like them ballads so much? Seemed like all you wanted to play was ballads and standards'

He thought.

'Urhh' he rasped, and thought some more. He tapped his fingers and thumb again.

'I like ballads. They're like remembering.'

Miles wondered by which steps exactly he'd come into this room.

Miles was vamping at the loud behest of the audience, advanced, adroit. Blowing the first solo between cigarette takes — la de da, la de da da ree dar daar, higher and higher stacked fourths with a third on top, eyes shut for the squeals which Dizz said he couldn’t play anyway. Vamping the line to pump it with the swing — the play is full but he can feel its progress creeping up on him like hooks, drawing a closure in his mind not in melodies but alternate rhythm cuts, little punctuation marks ellipsing into tom tom doubles and the first tenor solo. Miles looks stage left, looking up from his slouch with horn against chest, and wanders over to the wings to watch the band.

With only his eyes pointed anywhere specific, vaguely concentrating on the hammers and strings of the open piano popping up and down with the progression of the blues, he thought ‘bout the feel of this group which was ‘on’ and the shouting crowd which was ‘on’ and of the record they cut the Friday before whose lines he was still playing tonight, the lines everybody seemed to know no matter what, as if they owned them like Happy Birthday. Everyone falling into it and shouting for more, some really deep response in the room like that gig in… when he played with…

He cranked a valve and cleared the gob from his horn. Stubbed his cigarette on the floor. Looked back at the crowd for a second. Counted the bars, eyeing the pianist on the 15th, 16th to cue him in. Jagged fills right off the count. Piano bringing it all back to minor sevenths, now playing with wide open spaces as if to clear the air and wait for all eyes, then mincing back into jagged chops. Space then cutting chords. Space and rubble. Miles had already told him off for it but he was willing to play fuck the man. Looking at his face all sweating beads and mouthed voicings and private whoops and emoting till the suit looked tired… everybody going somewhere and using the band like a gateway to something better, all reverence and respect in practice but dissing quiet arrogance up under lights. Something familiar about that mouth emoting smiles and sweat over his groove. Seen in Paris somewhere, dee dara da, ta dara dara da. All those choppy chords and nowhere to put them. Like he just don’t feel the piano. That mouth… One of the chicks in the entourage who knew the language and always dropped an ‘entres nous’ into her conversation. The exact same smiles like they were going out of business. Just hanging on. Not ‘on’. Not there.

Again like a flash, all the women like prayer beads or something, strung around his head. And the fatigue of working all the egos in his band, tapping the first three fingers on the tip of his thumb, in rhythm with the bass. Looking elsewhere.

Miles looked down at the sling going in and out of the mesh of dark flesh and hair, and the pink comma of her clit pointed up and winked back at him. Miles was a leading man and needed a new tenor. Sonny had the look of the regular horse about him; Coltrane was either coming or going off the H but could at least hold a gig, so he was in. Miles had someone else inform Sonny, the lately absent Sonny, solo Sonny. Passing through a club later he didn't meet his eye but left en route to a quick fix. Philly said he looked damp and clammy. Damp browsweat of the late fix hurriedly jammed up the vein in a broken cubicle out back of some restaurant. 'Only so many years ago,' Miles thought of his own race with the skids. Last thing he needed now was a regular junk crew shooting offa his payroll. The Miles Honour Roll.

The stink was all over him like gravy; Miles was all over but still there; she was trying to meet him with her mouth; now lolling back on the edge for her fill with the sling at half apex. Groans of the lusting done. He started thinking 'bout the heat for the girls, the way they came up and demanded in his eyes at the end of gigs and the usual fucking with the first light in some basement apartment, some lo-rent number with high barred windows just like this room, with newspaper trucks rumbling outside, or the quick hat coat and cab back to 34th street for an iced tea antacid and all the rest.

He'd been staring at her from Miles distant, thinking it finally over — and she reaches, sitting up gently touching his cheek and looking into his face and breathing liquidly with the arch inquisition of satisfaction or something else alltogether, her touch bringing him to, back as if he'd forgotten himself and she somehow surprised him. He could've sworn he was in two places at once. He sat back against the bedstead with the sheet, tapping a phrase on fingers and thumb.