Catherine George Read online

  Annotated Setlist of the Mikaela Cole Jazz Quintet

  — by Catherine George —

  Tight Squeeze

  That solo! Art blowing so hard and so hot, jumping out like a solar flare. Art, the only one of us with a real instrument, a beat-up old brass thing with the spit of two hundred years of play in it—and, well, sometimes we thought you could hear the difference. Oh, people said the 3-D printers could make horns that sounded just as good, blew just as pure, and Mikaela said it was worth it to have anti-grav, so she could tow the piano behind her wheelchair—but still, there was something about knowing the horn had been on Earth, that there might be red clay or Terran bacteria gummed up under the keys. Every note heavy with the weight of time.

  We never asked Art where he’d gotten a real Earth tenor sax, but there must have been a doozy of a story there.

  Zymosis

  This one we came up with the first time the five of us ever played together, on a Tenthday night down at that bar Lee Jae-jin ran on the lower deck of the ship’s outer ring.

  The bar was squashed between a bot maintenance stall and a gray-water recycler, and across the ring was a shop that specialized in VR experiences of life planetside, even though those were thirty-odd years out of fashion. The whole quadrant smelled like seaweed from the algae synthesizers down-deck. It was a terrible spot for a bar, anybody could see that! Jae-jin didn’t care, though. He just wanted a place where he could take rice or barley or potatoes and make drinks like they had back on Earth, drinks with names like uisghe and makgeolli and ouzo, drinks that didn’t taste much like synthanol and didn’t sell like it either. He liked to say they were acquired tastes, but of course nobody on board had ever acquired them.

  And, well, maybe it was the drinks list or maybe it was the neighborhood, but after 1900 hours the bar was always empty. When Mikaela fixed on starting a band she figured she’d ask her old pod-mate Jae-jin about practicing down there, because it seemed like the perfect place for a newborn jazz quartet.

  Jae-jin said yes, just so long as he could come and play his trumpet.

  “You play the trumpet?” Mikaela said, surprised. She’d never heard him play in the three years they’d shared a pod.

  Jae-jin said, looking away: “Sure, sure! I’ve been playing a long time, friend.”

  He’d played trumpet on music nights in crèche, alright. Sometimes, after the group got rolling, we’d go down to the bar and spy him hiding out back, long black hair spilling loose, warm blush of exertion rising under tawny skin as he chased the solos on old recordings, trying to wrest control of the melody back from the horn. He worked hard at it, he did, but jazz wasn’t a passion for him like it was for some of us. We figured he must really need the culture credits.

  So there we were, that first night: Mikaela at the baby grand, the rest of us revolving around her like moons in synchronous orbit. We’d already played some classics, Monk and Coltrane, Akiyoshi and Washington, Glasper and Onwuachimba—not too shabby, we thought, for our first time together—when Mikaela suggested we jam, see what came of it.

  “Alright, what about this, something real simple,” she said, long brown fingers spooling out chords into a loose, sparkly melody: something with a little swing, not too show-offy. After she’d played it a few times, everybody else—drums, bass, sax, trumpet—eased in, shy and tentative, like new pod-mates. We slipped behind while the piano raced ahead, laughing, urging us on. Then Mikaela nodded to Art, the saxophone leaped out into a solo, and finally things began to simmer, the music mixing on the air with the old-sock smell of Jae-jin’s bubbling brews.

  From there it was easy; we fell into the melody like meteors, the piano and the sax trading lines until we wound the tune up tight.

  Fifth Wheel

  As a name, sure, it was a bit old-fashioned, smelling of Earth like it did. But then we figured a jazz quintet could hardly be anything else, so we didn’t mind too much. And there was a story to the name—

  It was early in the band’s history; we’d just finished the song, a dizzy, exuberant little thing, and there was backslapping, a loud call for drinks. Gigs, festivals, five-ring tours: all that was pinwheeling through our heads. We lined up at the low glossy slab of plasti-crete that served as a bar, below the shelf filled with bottles of Jae-jin’s strange brews. In the backlight, they glowed like so many red suns.

  Jae-jin, seeing we were curious, pulled one down and began to pour.

  “Try it, try it,” he said, eager. (On work rotation he was in chemistry, trying to improve the texture and flavor of synth food; he was always foisting his creations on us. Sometimes we liked them, and sometimes . . . well, sometimes not.) “I aged it in a barrel. A real wood barrel, if you can believe it—oak, real Earth oak”—and we figured then we knew why he needed extra credits.

  Whatever-it-was tasted like burned toast and scorched our throats like the afterburn from a rocket. Some of us wondered, silently, whether he’d gotten the process quite right, if the recipe in the databanks had left out some steps. Art, too old to keep quiet, put down his glass, and said, confused: “Is this how it’s supposed to taste?”

  Jae-jin laughed, but when he said, quiet, “I don’t know,” we hurried to push our glasses across the bar for refills.

  After that we turned to business: the song needed a name.

  “Old Drones,” Fe suggested. We thought that was pretty much the worst name we’d ever heard, and said so.

  “But it’s got that clanking bit! Like gears, right?” Fe said, and when we shook our heads they sighed and pouted into their drink, melodramatic as any episode of Farthest Star.

  “The Experimental Blues?” That was Jae-jin.

  “It’s not exactly experimental,” Mikaela pointed out, rolling a little sphere of green-and-blue glass—a marble, she said it was called, something she’d pocketed from the archives—into the shadowed valleys between her knuckles and back up onto the cool brown flat of her hand. She was always moving her hands, Mikaela was, playing with something, a credit chip or a chew sphere or a child’s toy.

  “No?”

  “It’s pretty standard bebop. Nineteen-fifties stuff.”

  “Ah. I suppose not, then,” Jae-jin muttered.

  If we hadn’t gotten it already, that Jae-jin didn’t know much about jazz, we got it then. Mikaela was our expert, our bandleader. There was no jazz in the databanks she hadn’t heard, nothing about the history of jazz she didn’t know. She’d played solo for a long time, and tried to tour around, but the fashion then was for bands—nobody wanted to hear a musician play by themselves, it was anti-communal.

  Romy, just out of crèche, had been taking lessons on the bass since she was a child. She knew her vamp from her walk, her broken time from her break. Fe, well, they always said they had bossa nova in their blood; and we knew they had rhythm.

  And Art? We didn’t know much about him, except his age, and we could read that on his face: the papery white skin lined in gray, like the bark of the aspens circling the Commons. But we knew he could blow; we figured he must have been playing for years, long before any of us were born. He’d never said a damn thing about his experience with jazz, but we figured he probably knew everything we did, and more.

  There was a pause for drinks. It grew on you a bit, Jae-jin’s stuff did.

  Romy had pushed her glass across the bar for a refill a couple times, and after a bit she began to look a little queasy, beads of sweat prickling all over the ochre of her upper lip, normally spiky purple hair wilting under one restless hand.

  “Okay, I am thinking: Planetfall,” she said, after the fourth glass.

  We remembered, then, that she really was that young—ju
st out of childhood. There was a moment of silence while we all looked away, into the bottom of our drinks, or out the port at the back of the bar, to the distant view of bots harvesting rice from the verdant emerald curve of the ship’s inner hull.

  “Nobody wants to hear a song called Planetfall,” Art said, gently, in his growl of a voice.

  “Let’s play it again,” Mikaela suggested, a distraction before we all got too close to the abyss, to thinking about things it was better not to think about.

  It sounded strange the second go—and not just in the way a song does when you’re improvising, playing into the solos—but we kept bashing our way through: Art, face serious under the swoop of his remaining silver hair; Fe, gloriously fat, bobbing with the rhythm, light gleaming off the dark gold of their head like the reflection off Art’s sax; Jae-jin, lurking at the back, glasses slipping down his nose, trumpet barely keeping up; and Mikaela, the mound of her box braids swaying side to side as she carried us through, professional as always. It wasn’t until the end that we noticed Romy: she was leaning on her instrument like a crutch, sweat streaming down her face and dripping into the belly of the bass, rolling around in there like the saltiest of seas.

  “You okay?” Fe asked, poking her with a drumstick. Romy blinked, tried to straighten up.

  “Oui, oui, c’est tiguidou,” she murmured, blinking. We mostly stuck to Common Shipboard, but get a few rounds in Romy and she lapsed into her crèche-mother’s lullaby tongue.

  “You weren’t playing, friend,” Mikaela said.

  “Non?”

  “Nope.”

  There was a pause as she visibly pulled herself back together.

  “We’re playing which one?” she said, thick-tongued.

  We were lucky to get her to the head before she bellowed like a moose. When she came back out, wiping the awful residue off her face, she said she had it: “Fifth Wheel.”

  “Why?” Mikaela said, cautious, not hating it.

  “Well,” she said, “Nobody minded that I was not playing. The song, it’s complete without the bass. Like a fifth wheel, yes?”

  Corner Pocket

  A bouncy, looping rhythm, horns blaring like the crowd at a shipball game, the piano holding it all together until, crashing, it fell apart again . . . a souvenir, this one. A souvenir of those long afternoons in Jae-jin’s bar, of the jazz-brain fever we got after a couple hours chewing coca and sucking back synth brew, feeling like forever was a Ninthday afternoon.

  In those days, we’d started coming down three, four times each Tenthday, sometimes practicing, and sometimes doing shows that felt more like jumped-up rehearsals than anything else, with an audience that mostly couldn’t say no to an invite—oh, there were a smattering of friends and acquaintances, some fans of Mikaela’s from her time playing solo, but the mainstays were Jae-jin’s bond-circle, Romy’s crèche-sibs, Mikaela’s triad, and Fe’s wife, Geneviève. (Art never invited anybody, not that we saw.)

  The bar was a good place to play, though, even when attendance was sparse. Jae-jin had it done up like something from Earth, and we thought it looked good considering the space used to be an Office of Colony Establishment, back when we thought there would be a colony to establish. There were incandescent filters on the lights, to give it an old-time look, so that every time we came in we had to adjust to being steeped in gold, marinated in amber. There was even something called a “pool table.” Jae-jin’d had the equipment printed and a few times, when we were relaxing after practice, Mikaela tried to teach us to play. She’d seen a video in the databanks, she said.

  Well! None of us could figure it out, though Art came the closest, sinking a few balls every time we played.

  “You should toss it,” Fe said to Jae-jin after another of their balls hit the edge and bounced out, suspending midair for a moment before slamming to the floor. The gravity wobbles that close to the bottom of the ship didn’t make it any easier. “It’s broken, yeah?”

  But the pool table stayed. He liked to the get the details right, our Jae-jin did.

  Everybody Else (Can Do, Can Do)

  The closest we ever got to avant-jazz. The name was a joke, from one night spent listening to random cuts Mikaela had pulled from databanks; and Jae-jin, after hearing something atonal, all sprawling dissonance, complained that “Everybody else can do whatever they want, but I switch to the key of D and Mikaela says it’s not jazz.”

  Angels’ Share

  Ah, this song! This was where Jae-jin had his first real successful solo.

  One night he’d gotten us tangled up in a real train wreck, the trumpet going off the rails and taking the rest of us with it, and afterward he was sitting morosely behind the bar, sipping a glass of the drink called whiskey.

  “These things take time,” Mikaela said. “You’ve got a good ear, thank Ship. But you know it won’t happen at the speed of light.”

  “Like your barrels, eh?” Romy said, gesturing to the backroom that housed Jae-jin’s experiments. “The drinks spend a long time in there, or they are no good, yes?”

  Jae-jin swirled the liquid in his glass. “You know, the whole time it’s in there, it’s evaporating? The longer it’s in the barrels, the more that’s lost.” He took a small sip. “On Earth they called the part that was lost the angels’ share.”

  And the next night, when Mikaela put down a pensive melody, the piano asking some question we couldn’t quite name, Jae-jin picked it up and blew a slow, foggy response, and in it we heard the story of how long we’d been in here, and how long we would be still, and what things had been lost and might still be lost before we set foot on some distant planet.

  1957 Overture (Pata Pata)

  A riff on a song that was popular on the livestreams back then, a thing made of mashed-up old Earth tunes, a woman’s joyful voice soaring above the blare of cannons and strings. Ours had the horns coming in hard, like asteroids exploding on the hull shield, but when we put our version on the livestreams it didn’t get so many ears.

  Why not, though? Gen, Fe’s wife, signed, one night after we’d played a show in a Sichuan restaurant. That was the sort of place we got gigs: out-ring bars and down-level diners, places where they were trying things the way Jae-jin was trying things, not synth food at all. And once we’d played a VR party set in old-time New Orleans, but only once—we had to draw the line somewhere.

  I like your music. It feels right, like it belongs here on the ship.

  We all looked to Mikaela, and Romy got hurriedly up and went to watch a low-grav dance troupe on the vidscreen in the corner, and Jae-jin took off for the kitchen to talk to the chef—

  “We’re out of fashion,” Mikaela said, smashing her drink down on the table. We’d all heard this rant before.

  Fe interpreted, hands flashing ahead of familiar words.

  “There’s only two things people want to hear these days, and we’re not playing either of them. I mean, thank Ship we’re not playing that horrible star stuff”—the big thing in music then was people turning the vibrational frequencies of the stars, the bellowing of gas giants, into strange atonal symphonies—“because I’ve heard more melody from a malfunctioning synth bot.”

  Mikaela was on work rotation in the archives, helping decide when new music should go into the databanks, to act as an official representation of who we’d been in our shipboard years. She couldn’t vote against the star music—too popular—“but I wish people would stop listening to it, so I could stop, too.”

  That was the way of things, we always told her. There were those on the ship that wanted to look forward, not back, even if they weren’t sure what there was to look forward to. We could forgive them the impulse, mostly, even if it meant hearing a three-hour dirge composed using the sound of water sloshing beneath the surface of an icy moon.

  Yes, Gen signed, having sat patiently through Mikaela’s tirade about the transmission of culture, the devaluation of traditional forms and the solo instrumentalist. But I’ve seen string quartets and pop
bands and rappers playing the Commons. Right?

  Mikaela sighed and nodded, signed Yes, right. There were always those that performed the old ways, and some of those things made it into the great ship concerts on the Commons, and then into the databanks, if they were good enough, popular enough. That was what Mikaela wanted, we knew—to be in the databanks. Sometimes we’d see her fingers going, going, going on the edge of the table, playing through more imaginary riffs than you could ever need in one career. She was looking for something, a song that could write her name into memory: Mikaela Cole, jazz pianist. Part, however small, of the story we told ourselves.

  How do they get there?

  “Luck. Playing in front of the right people. You know the Council picks acts for the Commons?”

  Gen nodded.

  “Well, they’re not coming down here for mapo doufu. At least not on the nights we’re playing.”

  So Blue

  There was a recording, in the databanks, of the last broadcast from the drones on Gliese-786. We didn’t know what it sounded like, but we knew it was in there. It was part of our story, however much we might have wanted to forget. Nobody ever made music from that, though.

  Trying

  Fe had started to show up later and later for practice.

  “Fire,” we heard Fe say, when Mikaela took them out into the ring to talk about it. “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re an hour late,” Mikaela said.

  “I didn’t realize.”

  Mikaela gave up on it, and we got busy coming up with a new song. Mikaela had written out a lead sheet, like she sometimes did, but that night it was Fe that led us out, with an advancing wall of rhythm that rattled us all around in an old tin can. Everyone else just had to pick their moments, if they wanted to be heard.

  “Ship, Fe,” Mikaela said, when it was done. “Where did that come from?”

  “You like it?” Fe said.

  Now normally they were the bright light in our group, in their neon silkex jumpsuits, bare head painted with great galactic blasts of color, always with the big laugh and gap-toothed smile. (To see them you’d hardly believe the stories of their troubled youth—oh, nothing terrible, no anti-ship behaviors—just the games lost kids play, hacking VRs and burning credits, and they’d clawed their way out of it, settled down to married life and a work rotation in credit reg, structuring our communal systems to keep us all on course, from falling into our own unmapped spaces.) But that night they were different: far away, quiet.