The Jazz Man

The jazz man has his favourite place on the road. It isn’t a glamorous high street, his road. It’s a little bit run down, central enough to keep it busy but not central enough to keep the rents up and the riff raff away. People pass through the street. There’s a cluster of buss stops where office workers gather right next to the alcoholics who spill out at all hours of the day from the twenty four hour bar. There’s often a splattering of blood on the footpath on a Monday morning, the remnants of the weekend. The night clubs come alive, some of them you could walk past in the day time and not even realise there was anything there. But come the late nights, and you’ll find them easily enough by the queues of people waiting to get in.

This street isn’t just run down though. As the rents go down, the less affluent but more creative folk move in. They call the area “edgy” and give it a certain kind of chic. Following them are the tattoo artists, and the vegetarian restaurants, and coffee served by the clients of the tattoo artists. Sooner or later the street will “benefit” from its cool. The shops will slowly get less affordable for those who live there and before long their divey flats will be advertised as funky character pads at twice the rent. But for now this seems a bit of stretch to the jazz man as he sets up his busking spot; turns a crate on its end and spreads his beanie out as a collection plate.

He has a space that he prefers. It’s halfway between two sets of traffic lights. He always picks the sunny side of the road, even in the heat of summer. He’ll open up his saxophone case in front of his little seat. He’ll take hold of the instrument in his oversized hands and wait. He doesn’t start until the right moment strikes. The phases of the traffic lights form a kind of urban air lock. There’s a golden period, maybe tens of seconds at most, where there’s no traffic on his little strip of this longer, dirty strip. It’s almost like someone has put the city on mute for a moment. A street sweeper might shuffle along, or the clip clop of a woman in high heels on the other side of the road. But mostly it’s quiet. It feels to the jazz man a lot like the main street in a small town. There are people, but there isn’t the need for big city noise, things keep happening but life is just a little bit more civilised for a moment.

That’s when he starts playing. He takes this golden moment and tries to add to it with his songs. He’ll sit there for hours on end, passers by dropping coins for him. Along with the occasional note if he’s lucky. Helpful as they are, these notes aren’t the highlight of his day. It’s the times when the quite comes, when he’s playing away. That’s what keeps him coming back to this spot to play for the people walking past, whether they drop a note or a coin, or nothing at all.