“Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Margaret Weir, I love you.”

The rhythm section cranked up to a blistering pace, the drums slashing a jagged path along which the bass walked in earnest. The piano played a catch-up game, hanging lazily behind, then leapfrogging across great spaces, only to straggle to the back again.

Pabadabbadabbadabbadoobididoo, pipidideebideebideebideebididee, spaa-roooo-sipsideeeee, deee-deeeeeee. Unison. Repeat the phrase again.

Marshall launched into a gymnastic solo, sending notes tumbling and somersaulting and vaulting from his alto sax around the room. At the end of his twelve bars he nodded to Phil.

Phil stepped up to the mike, and as he was about to fill in the middle and edges of his solo sketch he found himself with a blank sheet. So he did what any intelligent musician would have done in such a crisis: he paraphrased Marshall’s solo and tried to pass it off as commentary.

He thought fast during Marshall’s next turn, but before he was finished he was up again. He stepped up to the mike again, directionless, getting himself in and out of jams guilelessly like a desperate thief on the run in a strange neighborhood, as the pianist lobbed chord changes at his chest, and the drummer stepped up the tempo.

Marshall stepped back to the mike again, announcing his return with a loud honk above the roar of the crowd. Reveling in the fast tempo, he took off on long runs that melted notes into each other, and took sudden dives into deep blues cries, sweat glistening on his wrinkled forehead. He played fast, hard, and reckless, making adventurous shifts like a confident driver with a Porsche on an Alpine road. He careened over chord changes, redlined the tempo, and skidded around turns in the melody. He cocked his sax flamboyantly and rocked his body wildly, bucking and railing like a Pentecostal minister caught up in the spirit.

Phil watched all this in amazement while he tried to sketch something out. But he couldn’t concentrate beneath Marshall’s barrage.

Taking a glance offstage, Phil saw Margaret’s disappointment and blew her a kiss, which she returned feebly. It touched Phil’s heart to know that he had let her down, and right then and there he decided that he had to do something to redeem himself. Before he had time to chart what it was, though, he was up again.

Having no idea what he was going to play, Phil took Marshall’s advice and played without thinking. And out of his soul oozed Welsh ditties, barroom songs, fugues and arias, bits and pieces of symphonies, themes from BBC programs and Tom Jones hits, and Gregorian chants. He turned them inside out … upside down … crushed them and mixed them … compressed them and extended them … swallowed some notes, suggested others, warped some this way and others that, and formed them in a bolus that he regurgitated and rammed them down Marshall’s throat bar after bar until Marshall called it a night ten minutes later.