1. How High the Moon


    Date: 11/13/2016, Categories: Lesbian, Author: BradleyStoke, Rating: 3, Source: LushStories

    figures gazing up at her, clutching glasses of wine and beer in their hands. Although Lynn is a smoker, she is grateful for the city policy that means she now plays in a venue that smells more sweetly than her uptown apartment. She thanks the audience for their appreciation, reminds them that they are listening to the Lynn Wood Trio, and tells them what songs she’s just played. Although too much chat is frowned on at a jazz gig, she feels obliged to give a little background to her next number. “My daughter lives in L.A. now,” she says hesitantly. “She’s an optometrist, I think. Some kind of eye specialist. But when I wrote this song, she was just a little girl. And I still think of her as one whenever we perform it. Here it is: Kirsten !” Indeed, it is memories of her dearest and only fruit of her womb that fill her thoughts as she plays her own pianistic tribute to the restraint and beauty of Bill Evans who was such a great influence to Lynn in those early days in Peckham and, later, North London. Those were hard days and Lynn knows only too well that a single tune, however sincerely meant, can scarcely begin to recompense for the neglect she’d actually shown her daughter. Those were days when a regular supply of smack and a series of relationships, unsatisfactory and ecstatic in equal measure, were far more important to her than a wailing child whose father had left her when Lynn was still a fifth-form pupil. Even those formative days of premature motherhood were just a ...
    momentary stumble in a series of boyfriends, drugs and a passion for music that owed nothing at all to the subtleties and rhythm of Bill Evans or Duke Ellington. However, as the fashion for the disco of Sister Sledge and Chic was supplanted by jazz funk and Lynn’s growing interest in the origins of those more intriguing rhythms, music was mostly just the backdrop to her carnal and narcotic indulgences. When she wrote her song, the nearest any of her compositions has ever approached to commercial success, it was more a guilty tribute to the feelings she felt she ought to have towards her daughter than a reflection of the love she actually expressed. ‘The Brat’, as she’d privately christened the optometrist-to-be, was an awkward child who resented the series of wholly unsuitable boyfriends shooting up in the squalid bedroom she shared with her mother. Perhaps that was why Lynn sees so little of the daughter celebrated in the wistful melodies of her most celebrated opus. And why Kirsten dedicates herself to a life as unlike that of her reprobate mother as it is possible to be. When she and her boring accountant husband have children of their own it is unlikely they’ll know anything other than the comforts of West Coast Suburbia. It is Paul’s turn for a prolonged solo and he smiles broadly as he acknowledges Lynn’s nod. Dave Holland, look out! Lynn leans back on her stool and lets her eyes wander about the audience she hasn’t really had the opportunity to study before. It is the ...
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