She said ‘Jules honey, don’t you let nothing, and I mean nothing, happen to her, you hear?’

She wasn’t no Coltrane, you see. But Indonesia had one special song that she would do—Nina Simone’s Since I Fell for You. That song hit home like a fist. Every time I heard it, felt like my heart was being snared and slapped like a drum.

INDONESIA JAZZ BY ASPEN GAINER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 22

Music sparkles off his clothes, drips like sweat from his black brow. It pours out of the gap in his front teeth. The crowd, mesmerized, hears the melody in the way he smiles, the way the light flashes from his teeth. They hear it in the way he lifts the saxophone to his lips, caressing it like a lover. His liquid black gaze pierces my own, and a grin twitches at one corner of his mouth.

A burnt-out jazz joint. The air is thick and hazy; twitching, convulsing, ablaze with Coltrane-Davis-Monk notes. He’s sitting up on stage on the edge of a stool (the well-loved and well-polished saxophone on his knee) scatting and joking with the crowd. The breathy, bosomy back-up girl adds a voluptuous ambia…