The reverse side of the piano score’s back cover was actually further music. It looked like the very beginning of a tenor sax part Gail had started to write for a different piece, called “A Bach Ache” (cute), and beneath the title was the billing “Opus 38.” She’d obviously abandoned it soon after beginning. The part was almost nothing, less than twenty notes. Above the G clef, Gail had written a memo to herself: “Clef?”

Gail saw my interest. “Oh, that’s nothing, I’m loath to say. A waste of manuscript paper, so I made use of it as a back cover. You have no idea how frustrated I was that I couldn’t do my own orchestration of Swing. This was before you mercifully rolled into town. It was a blow to my vanity that there are still things I don’t know how to do as a composer. So I tried arranging my own jazz version of a Bach air.” She took the page from me. “You like the title? You do get the joke, right?”

I told her I got it.

“I figured I ought to be able to handle a simple sax part like this. And I could, Ray.” She laughed. “All the way up through bar thirteen. That’s when I learned that, hallelujah, Jack Donovan was moving into the Claremont for two weeks. The one arranger I thought could handle the chart was going to be fifteen minutes away from me. Some miracle, was it not?”

I agreed that it had all been quite miraculous.

A radio had been turned on somewhere in the house, closer to where we were working. It was loud, and we could hear it clearly from where we sat: a live broadcast from the California Coliseum, Treasure Island’s largest indoor theater. The American Society of Composers and Publishers was putting on the greatest pop concert of all time, one great American tune after another performed by the men and women who had written (and set) our standards.

George M. Cohan was just finishing a rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” To top that, Irving Berlin began belting out “God Bless America” and the crowd at the coliseum sang along. The radio’s volume increased. I stepped out into the hallway and realized the music was coming from Russ’s bedroom, the door of which was closed. It must have been deafening in there.

Then I heard a sound I’d heard many a time over the years through the thin walls and ceilings of hotel rooms in which I and my band buddies were staying. That slow, steady chugging of bedsprings, the relentless creak of the floorboards, the odd banging of the headboard against the wall, punctuated by the occasional coarse grunt or shivery moan.