I can remember George Lewis and how the room smelled of smoke and beer and sweat. Breathing deep I can remember being up so very high and seeing the top of my Dad’s head. I can’t remember why I was on George Lewis’s shoulders when I was two years old, only the persistent rumbling noise; shapes, shadows dancing random across my eyes. Maybe the pictures were real, maybe not.

I can remember later in the street feeding the rag and bone man’s piebald horse. The horse couldn’t see me unless I stood front of him and my mother wouldn’t let me do that. She didn’t understand that the blinkers blocked the view or how the scent and heat of his shining black and white coat embraced me. I stared up not down, breathing deep. I never saw what Dad helped the toothless rag and bone man load up onto his cart. I can remember too the meandering echoes of Billie Holiday and New Orleans jazz. 

I can remember much later standing on the corner of Cambridge Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue waiting for you. Looking. Would I know you now that you are old, would you know me now that I am nineteen? And then there you were, I saw you. I watched you looking furtive and anxious and guilty. But for whom the guilt? Maybe for all of us. Then we sat awkward and afraid of each other, no mention of sitting on a man’s shoulders or wanting to look a piebald horse in the eye. It was just uncomfortable words passing as conversation between a lonely daughter and her estranged father. The girl was unacknowledged. The man was unknown. They were anonymous, cloaked a hidden shared yearning, wanted none of this to be true, wanted that none of it had happened.

But it had; it could only keep on happening unless the pattern changed. She wanted it but he didn’t. “It was a long time ago.” Denial, hiding, blocking, rejection. Rejection again, but that wasn’t true either, just the thing he knew he had to do. There were other considerations, other truths, other hearts he must not let break.  

The sounds and chaos of emotions grown and slowly settled over many years, over many sad walks around Cambridge Circus, over many times in the 100 Club and the Pizza Express in Soho. The tears in the dark, the heaving gulping sobs, the weeping and slow tears for what was so long gone, were ceased. The laughter came back, the joy of hearing him play, of seeing faces smiling from the past. “It should never have happened” Monty said. And then Dad died. And no it never should have happened but it did and out of destruction he had build much more. He had given something to share, something of love remembered.

A new CD with tracks from 1959. Dad on drums and George Lewis on clarinet. Listen to it? Absolutely. But not just yet. I can’t …