red scarf only for a moment before she stepped back, disappearing into the shadows.
If she was here again to listen to the music, why was she waiting outside on such a miserable night?
I thought about going across to say something, but looking down at the sodden condition of my pant leg, I decided against it.
Reaching into the car, I grabbed the two tom cases and took my second load into the club. When I came out again, the doorway opposite was empty.
Ronald was in fine form that night, mainly because a couple of local pianists were in the house. He felt that interlopers (as he referred to them) were always after his gigs. So we defended our turf with a couple of fast opening numbers courtesy of Duke Ellington’s fertile imagination. That got the evening’s festivities off to a good start.
The way the open mike thing had evolved was that interested singers would speak with Ronald before each set. When he found out what they wanted to perform, he’d arrange the song choices in such a way that we didn’t wind up with five ballads in a row, or two people singing the same tune back to back.
The first sets each week were generally the best for two reasons: the people who had come specifically to sing most often wanted to sing early. The third set featured more of the sort of performances that relied on “Dutch courage”, the half-drunken person saying, “I can sing better than that clown!” followed by his or her equally drunk acquaintances goading the poor soul on. Those were our “train wrecks” – frightening, pathetic and comical all at the same time.
The girl must have slid in sometime during the first set while my attention was occupied elsewhere. In the second-to-last tune, an older gentleman who’d sung a few times in recent weeks was in the middle of a competent rendition of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” when I looked over at that dark corner of the club, and there she was. She had on the same worn blue duffel coat and the black toque jammed down on her head. Her face had a small frown of concentration as she mouthed the lyrics with the singer.
I again thought of going over to speak with her but got corralled into a conversation with two of the club regulars. By the time that broke up, we had to start the second set.
As the evening progressed, we had some surprisingly good performances and only a few disasters, none of them too excruciating. Dom, Ronald and I were playing well, and in a few tunes we stretched things out a bit, which left the poor vocalists standing around with nothing to do, but hell, we were feeling good. I forgot about the waif at the back of the club.
We were getting ready to finish off the final set with a couple of nonvocal numbers when the girl appeared next to Ronald’s grand piano, staring at us with huge, frightened eyes.
“What is it?” he asked testily. “Do you have a request?”
The girl shook her head. “I want to sing,” she said in a tiny voice. “The open mike night is over. If you want to sing, you’ll have to come back next week.”
She didn’t move. Even with the duffel coat on, it was easy to see she was absolutely quaking in her boots. Coming up to the bandstand had taken a lot of courage on her part.
“I want to sing,” she said softly but defiantly.
Dom, perhaps sensing that this might be a good bit of sport, said, “Aw, let her, Ronny,” then turned to the girl. “What song, darling?”
She mumbled something indistinguishable.
Ronald decided to remain obnoxious – not much of a stretch for him. “If that’s how loud you sing, you’re not going to make much of an impression on the audience.”
As he stretched out his hand to indicate the sixty or so people still in the club, the poor girl’s eyes got wider, and I felt certain she’d bolt. I suddenly remembered she’d told me her name.
“Olivia,” I said loudly to attract her attention, “tell us the song you’d like to sing.”
She looked at me gratefully. “‘Skylark’. Do you know ‘Skylark’?”
Ronald rolled his eyes, since a woman had already sung it in the previous set.
“What key do you sing in?” Ronald asked impatiently.
Olivia looked confused. “I don’t know.”
“Then how can we play it?”
Her eyes pleaded with me for help.
“Can you sing it in the same key that we played it in earlier?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
Dom nodded. “B flat then, Ronald. The lady wants to sing.”
With her coat, hat and that scarf still on, she stepped onto the bandstand with a look of resolution. It took her a moment to figure out how to drop the mike stand to her height, but finally she looked over at Ronald, and with tight lips, nodded.
One of the two visiting pianists was still in the house, half-potted, having an earnest conversation with one of the better female vocalists of the evening, so Ronald made up a totally different intro to the song than the one he’d used earlier, and it really was quite brilliant. Olivia, totally at sea, turned to me with a frightened look, so I smiled and nodded reassuringly, indicating I’d help her come in.
Ronald finished with an arpeggiated chord roll to the upper end of the piano, and I mouthed “two, three, four” to bring her in.
She turned to the audience, shut her eyes and started to sing. “Skylark, have you anything to say to me...”
I had my brushes out, planning to join in for the second verse, and damn near forgot to come in.
The performance of this very odd girl was, to put it mildly, stunning.
There are always people who insist on talking through every song, regardless of the fact that it’s rude, irritating and distracting to those people who want to listen, but especially so to the musicians. By the time Olivia was halfway through the first verse, every eye in the house had turned to the stage. Even the bigmouth at the bar stopped gassing.
It wasn’t so much her voice – although no one could possibly have any complaints in that department. What had every person in that club riveted was Olivia’s delivery. The girl could flat out sell a song like nobody I’d ever heard.
“Skylark” is not a song you can belt out. It must be subtle, wistful, delicate, ingenuous. It’s about a young girl asking where her first love might be found. The performance earlier in the evening, which had been quite good, paled to black and white in comparison to the way Olivia was singing.
We always set up with me facing Ronald and Dom in the middle, since he’s the glue that holds us together musically, so I had a good view of her. Her eyes were shut tight, and she gripped the mike stand with both hands as if it were saving her from drowning, but her body remained supple, swaying gently with the music. Her awkward-looking outerwear suddenly didn’t seem important as the subtle nuance of her melodic shadings washed over us. You could visualize her having run in off the street to tell everyone about her search for love. I felt as if I were hearing this song for the very first time.
The trio rose to the occasion,
