Long bar here, barely room to move behind the people occupying the stools or standing as they belly up to the bar. Bartenders madly busy. A clatter of talk and clinking glasses. Squeezing behind these people, Amelia leads the guys to the back, where there is another door, and a doorman taking a fee for entering. Amelia shows him her wristpad and they are all three waved in.
Nearly empty room, very small. Tin ceiling painted blood red and crimped in square patterns. At the far end a band is setting up in a leisurely way, tuning electric guitars, trying out licks, chatting to each other in French. Half of them black Africans, half of them whites, no one seems local. After a while the guitarists settle down in folding chairs against the far wall and begin playing. It’s some kind of West African pop, fast and intricate. Two guitar players, an electric bass man, a drummer playing fast but quietly, mostly on one cymbal. The two guitars have different tones, one clean and sharp, the other fuzzy. They lay down complicated lines, crossing each other and the bass. Then a trumpet and a trombone player join in and pop some choruses in harmony. A man and a woman trade off on the vocals, which are in some language neither French nor English: very complicated shouting, followed by long howling melodies, wonderfully accentuated by the horns.
Infectious music, for sure. People from the bar drift in and some begin to dance. Pretty soon the room is full; this only takes thirty people. Amelia and the guys have been sitting against the back wall, but now Amelia pulls them to their feet and they join the dancing. The guys are not dancers. Some are born bad, some achieve badness… Mutt, the situation having been thrust upon him, moves in tiny abrupt jerks. Jeff flails so spastically he achieves some kind of nerd sublime. Amelia, somewhat to their surprise, was just born bad. Hands over her head, she twirls, she waves; she could not be more off the rhythm.
Jeff yells in Mutt’s ear, “Our gal is a terrible dancer!”
“Yeah, but can you take your eyes off her?”
“Of course not!”
“That’s Amelia for ya. Our klutz goddess.”
Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train.
Then another musician comes into the room carrying two instrument cases, one small, one big. Tall skinny guy, very pale white skin, black beard. The rest of the band waves to him, gestures for him to hurry and join in. He sits down and opens the large case and assembles something bizarre, the guys don’t even recognize it. “Bass clarinet!” Amelia shouts at them. She knows this band, she’s excited this guy is here. He also fits a mouthpiece onto a tiny saxophone, soprano sax no doubt, but curved like an alto rather than straight. Together the two reeds look like instruments from a clown circus.
Finally the young reed man stands up and gives the sax mouthpiece a lick, joins right in with the song already going. Okay, this is the star of the band. Immediately he is zooming around in the tune like a maniac. The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes. The young reed man sounds like he is maybe a klezmer star in his other bands, and it might not have been obvious before that klezmer fits so well with West African pop, but now it’s very clear. He swoops up and down the scale, screeches across the supersonic, jams in a perfect driving rhythm with the others. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, but it does. Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room. There is barely clearance for the band, they are pressed against the back wall, dancers occasionally elbow them. Jeff is a dancing fool; there are so many rhythms in this music that he almost matches one. In fact it’s pretty amazing he can miss all of them at once, but he can. And he is Nureyev compared to Amelia. Mutt can’t stop laughing at the sight of his two friends’ gyrations. Amelia is grinning at him. Very few gals dance so badly, she’s got a knack. The guys can’t help enjoying the sight of such a clumsy babe. Their friend, their dance partner! Might be some of the people in the room recognize her, but no one lets on, and maybe they don’t. It’s a big world. The reed man picks up the bass clarinet and plays it the same way he played the soprano sax, following the bass player through a chase the dancers mostly hear in their bellies. It’s weirdly thrilling. People start howling to release the vibrations.
Many songs later Amelia makes a gesture, and the guys nod. All things must pass, and it’s late. The dancing might go on all night, but they are content. They’ll freeze their ass on the trip home, they are so sweaty. But home they must go.
Back out through the jammed bar, louder than ever, where already people don’t seem aware of what they’re missing just one wall away. Up the steps, onto the frozen canal. Standing there, outside the hole running down to the bar.
It’s something like 4 a.m., so for once the city is quiet. Of course there are some people out and about, but still, it’s pretty empty, pretty quiet. There’s no indication whatsoever of what’s going on in the rooms beneath them.
They stare at each other like they are coming out from under a spell, shake their heads. They walk out onto the frozen canal, Amelia holding on to the guys, all stepping carefully. It is indeed cold. They will indeed freeze on the way home.
“Could you believe that guy on the whatever?”
“I know. Fucking amazing. Best music I ever heard.”
“And now, look at this, here we are right on top of the place, and it’s like they’re not even there!”
“It’s true. And there was hardly anyone there anyway. I never even caught the band’s name.”
“They might not even have a name.”
“Heck, there’s probably fifty bands like them playing tonight in this city. Dances like that going on right now, all over town.”
“It’s true. Fucking New York.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to:
Mario Biagioli, Terry Bisson, Ilene Brecher, Finn Brunton, Dick Bryan, Denis Bunting, Monica Byrne, Joshua Clover, Ron Drummond, Daniel Friedman, Laurie Glover, Kenneth Goldsmith, Usman Haque, Stephen J. Hoch, Bjarke Ingels, Fredric Jameson, Henry Kaiser, Leslie Kaufman, Drew Keeling, Lorenzo Kristov, Laura Martin and the 2016 Clarion selection committee, Randy Martin and Robert Meister, Beth Meacham, Colin Milburn, Lisa Nowell, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Phil Rogaway, Antonio Scarponi, Marcus Schaefer and Hiromi Hosoya, Carter Scholz, Sharon Strauss, and Lee Upshur.
Special thanks to Tim Holman.
By Kim Stanley Robinson
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