Fuller

Coltrane Changes and The Washington Street Blues

By Eleanor Fuller

Concepts and language in the Flanagan sections of this story lean on sources across media (print, audio, and web), with greatest debts owed to Vox's "The Most Feared Song in Jazz" and NPR's "Tommy Flanagan: Poet of The Piano."

BMaj7

Coltrane’s intervals on “Giant Steps” made pianist Tommy Flanagan dizzy. Like a Tilt-A-Whirl he couldn’t get off, until Coltrane, noticing him flounder, cut the piano solo short and giant-stepped in. Coltrane: monster with freakishly tight embouchure, three-octave range, and the grit of real genius.

You, laughing: call yourself an Ashkenazy Jew who wishes he were Harlem Black. Me, secretly: I’m nothing. We converge in the margins. I wish I were Jewish. I fetishize identity like it might make me whole, but I’m nothing. And not in the insidious absent-white-centre kind of way, or even the blandly middleclass way, although I suppose those too. I’m adopted. I have no origin story. Unless you count my adoptive mother’s brief account of my birth mother: a mutt sure, but Irish in all the worst ways. It may not need saying that my adoptive mother is all-caps Anglo-Protestant. Transplanted to Winnipeg during The Troubles and frozen, not just in time.

I want to be anything. Preferably your girlfriend. Flanagan to your Coltrane, even.

D7 →

‘Girlfriend’ is too basic to capture the way I want to solder myself to you. The shock of pheromones that fuses me to you in that stairwell leading down to the loo, on our first real date. I am coming up. You are going down. It’s like meeting again for the first time. Dumb luck, this tight space—crowded with shots of happy couples, kids—pressing us together. I know the instant you pull me to your chest. The soft flannel of you. But mostly your smell. I experience certainty exactly one other time in my life: on seeing my newborn’s lion brow. But that comes later, doesn’t it?

GMaj7

Flanagan claims he knew the charts perfectly well. I’m sure he did. They don’t look complicated. Neither do you, at first.

“Giant Steps” just didn’t move nice and easy like a ballad ought to.

Imagine Art Taylor behind his drum set shooting Tommy a sympathetic look as John counts the quarters in at 280 beats per minute. What did the charts say? Up Tempo? Right.

V-I

In all of Toronto, you choose for us a family restaurant with an Alpine vibe. Deeply neighbourhood-y, but not hip. No Mitzi’s Sister. The salmon is dry. The conversation awkward.

First dates are hard. Your smile is generous. Tender even, and shy.

I shouldn’t be here. Words channelled into nervous tines pushing potato around my plate for the last half hour.

Are you dying? Your eyes are sincere, but I have to laugh.

B♭7 →

Coltrane isn’t the only giant Flanagan accompanies. Also Ella, twelve years and change. Fuse sparked. They merge. On stage, anyway. New York, London, Helsinki, Montreux. Wherever they go, Flanagan sits at the piano, tall back, forearms and wrists an unbroken line. Long fingers, straight like Horowitz, no apple curve. A frank-talking touch. Mellowness, rare in keys. A reliable sideman, ready for anything. Almost.

E♭Maj7

We go home together that night. Your apartment in Parkdale. The old cop-shop-turned-artists’-residence. Mess around on your futon. Futon at thirty-five ought possibly to have tipped me off, but I was only book-smart back then, certainly no expert on signs of arrested development. We stop short of fucking because, I tell you, I cling to some rule about first dates. You slip fingers into my underwear. You’re ready for me, you say. I’m not. But even I don’t know this.

V-I

Dawn. At the streetcar stop outside your building, I stand on a parapet to kiss you goodbye. I am not short. You are giant. I’m not that special, you say. But it’s too late. I ride the Queen car to Spadina miles above its rattle.

Am7 →

The main take of “Giant Steps” was recorded on May 4th, 1959. Atlantic Studios, NYC. I wonder what pock of failure Flanagan permanently singed onto his psyche with the cigarette he must have lit afterwards. How he lugged that fateful solo around with him until, in 1982, he rerecorded “Giant Steps” in memory, he says, of Coltrane. Legend has it, before one performance, Tommy pointed skyward and said, If only you could see me now.

D7 →

I am nothing, but I’m also here on sabbatical. I give a talk on gender performativity in Catullus’s more vulgar poems. The talk is in an oak-panelled room called the Woodbury Library. At the end, graduate students circle me with their interesting questions. They hold their drinks intellectually, by the stem of a wine glass, or index finger pondering the square rim of an Old Fashioned. That there is stemware of any kind, other than plastic, signals how sexy my work has become. Although surrounded, I am so alone. I want to see you.

Your email: not a match made in heaven, but still nice to meet you.

Soon the word "toxicity" will dominate discourse on my poet.

GMaj7

Did failure make Flanagan obsess over “Giant Steps”? A virtuoso, he had nothing to prove until Coltrane came along with his big changes. A new chord at least every second bar, key centres leaps apart. Up Tempo. Sure. And Art Taylor looking all sympathetic like that. Flanagan could play. He would show them.

ii-V-I

I am not interested in toxic masculinity. Not even yours. I could care less about the porn bunnies in your browser history. Your trouble finishing without them. The way you eventually make that difficulty about me. When I started, I mostly wanted to know why verbs like paedico are still bowdlerised in translations of, say, Catullus 16. Why the standard Latin-English dictionary still defines this verb: to practise unnatural vice. God. I try to imagine a Valerius Flaccus or a Publius Cornelius Scipio reading the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, and all I can see is knitted brows and befuddlement: practise what now? From a Roman perspective, I figure, one can paedicare all one wants, provided one dominates on the rostra. Besides, even the briefest tour of jubilantly phallic Pompeii confirms how fond the Romans were of putting their cocks everywhere.

B♭7 →

Cock, my husband’s to be exact, also keeps me from divorcing Tiago. No matter how far apart we drift, he’s a ride I can’t bring myself to give up. He also put me through school. But I don’t tell you about sex with Tig when, at Big Sushi, I finally cop to the truth of my marital status. I can feel myself about to cross the arbitrary line I call cheating, but I can’t, thanks to some shred of morality, simultaneously lie to you. You who, despite that email, call me again. And again. Our first argument then, on the vinyl banquettes of a booth in a windowless back room over budget California rolls and spicy tuna. Baggage, you say. I bristle on Tig’s behalf and still let you drive me home.

E♭Maj7

Tommy came up in Detroit. Played the Blue Bird at sixteen. Or started to until owner Robert Du Bois noticed a minor at the piano and ran young Flanagan out of the club. Are you shitting me, kid? Rock glass in one hand, cigar in the other. Come back when you grow up!

Oh, you better believe I will. I can hear Tommy scuffing away down Tireman Avenue.

In 1990, he records Beyond The Blue Bird.

V-I

Dead cold inside your circa 1982 cargo van. I refuse to look at you. Oh, this is feeling like a real relationship now, you say.

I hold out, refusing the smile that threatens to crack my resolve. You stop outside my temporary housing on campus—Washington Street, two blocks southeast of the restaurant. I should have walked, but I wanted to stay close to you. I never want to leave you. Still in the van outside my flat, neither of us says a word. Eventually you cut the engine. Reach a hand out, covering mine. You can’t come in, I say. You drive me back to your apartment.

F♯7 →

I was cornered into marriage. First, I fell for Tig’s brown eyes, peaty with just a lick of moss left in. He could have had anyone with those eyes. Second, I loved him to spite my adoptive mother, who forbade me gallivanting with ruffians. To her, anyone working construction, or not Anglican, counted. You’ll have to marry him, then, she said to the floor when I came home pregnant at seventeen. Just like her mother, she hissed into the phone after she thought I’d gone to bed.

BMaj7

Tig’s family all started shouting in Portuguese when we told them. Everyone around the table sounded furious, but I could tell it didn’t matter because the skinny Americana was so pretty after all. Que linda! the aunties said. Thrusting a platter of cod bolinhos under my woozy nose. The baby vai ficar lindo! His uncles made sure Tig knew what to do. Get a big diamond and marry me straightaway. Before the futebol! They mimed round bellies through snorts of laughter. Legal! Gayo! They were so happy. I was cornered. And wed.

V-I

Sweden, 1957. Two years before “Giant Steps,” an album cover predicts the future. Graphics impish green and punning: TOMMY FLANAGAN, OVER, underneath which a wall of capital CCCCCCs. What it will take to get over Coltrane. On tour, Flanagan has stolen away to record his first solo album, Overseas. The label, Prestige. The studio, a dank, flooded basement with one microphone, two bottles of Gordon’s Gin, and a case of Danish Elephant beer down their throats. Elvin Jones, on drums, later says, what was flooded was us!

Fm7 →

You push me up against the coatrack in the narrow entrance of your apartment. One of its hooks presses into a vertebra at the base of my neck. I don’t feel it. I want your clothes off. Neither of us can wait the twenty steps to your futon. No matter how cinematic, how clichéd the memory reel, none of it is contrived. We fuck until morning. Eventually also on your futon, soaking the sheets until shivering in our own sweat we go again. We have, in fact, the hottest, least satisfying sex of my life. That night and countless nights. I cannot tell you this. I want you too badly. But also, you do not ask.

B♭7 →

Flanagan is known for being understated. Soft-spoken, self-deprecating. Instead of yammering, he played thoughts. On his reticence, second wife Diana sets the record straight. People misunderstood his reserve. He was a man of spirit and firmness. If you listen closely, you can hear the marrow coursing in his bones like music.

E♭Maj7

I don’t talk to you about my work. You finished high school. You read books. Your spelling sucks. After your gig at Gate 403 on Roncy’s, the cute pianist with the bouncing curls chats me up. Turns out he has a degree in linguistics. We’re talking Grimm’s Law and stop consonants when you join us. Grinning, you slurp froth off a pint of lager. He orders me another vodka martini. After a while, Gsus, am I smart enough for you? You laugh, all coy. The pianist looks doubtful. I catch a glimpse of myself disappearing. Someone changes the subject.

ii-V-I

1978, South of France. On tour with Ella. Flanagan makes a big change of his own. He leaves. Why do that? Routine, obscurity—First Lady always in the limelight—and a heart attack.

Enough playing that secondary role, he says. As much as she could change things around, you knew what was coming. It was feeling good to her. To an NPR host in 2000. Like the heart trouble had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Am7 →

When the drummer leads the band, count on a driving tempo. I love watching you indulge in a long solo. Your sticks crash through the centre of me like I’m the calf skin stretched on that bright Gretsch Broadkaster. The grooves on your ride cymbal. At Hugh’s Room, The Pilot, The Senator, The Rex, even the little café at Hart House. My life now revolves around your career, you call it. We eat roti from Bacchus, in bed, at weird hours and sleep all day. I keep missing library hours. But I don’t mind. One day, you don’t return my call. I stop eating and start running again. Your album in my ears, desperate for the fifth kilometer, so I can hear your voice on that last track.

D7 →

I don’t know if Flanagan and Coltrane ever worked together again. I do know Flanagan recorded a live solo album in 1994: In His Own Sweet Time. Ten tracks, all down tempo. Ballads, you might say.

GMaj7

Yearning. I give up on the chapter of the book I’m meant to be writing. Lyric infects my prose. All I want is gorgeous, intrepid adjectives. Every sentence addled with the damask scent of the massage oil I gave you. Us.

A month since you sat in the small of my back, fingers probing the edges of that knot in my shoulder. Your acute but gentle un-working of pain.

ii-V-I

Balliett is the first critic to call Flanagan the name that sticks: Jazz Poet. Elegiac fingers. The in-out breath of his piano more like Bird on sax than anyone else on keys. Tommy talking sinewy, talking clarity. Talking bright new thought stretched around every chord change and vision-quick line.

C♯m7 →

You insist on wearing that massage oil like a perfume. And I laugh thinking about Catullus’s promise to Fabullus. If he brings everything they need for a good time—the wine, the wit, the women—Catullus will give him an unguent that all the Venuses and Cupids have given his girl. So divine, claims the poet, that on smelling it, Fabullus will wish he were all nose. But I prefer the unmasked, feral smell of you.

F♯7 →

You say no because I must be on rebound. I will leave Tig for you. Your other reasons open a black pit in me. Weeks go by. I can’t claw my way back to the surface without you. You say you can’t help. But we keep bumping into one another on corners neither of us frequents, so we take a ski trip. You pick me up wearing red fleece pyjamas. Your woodsman attire? Impossibly, they make your long legs longer: skinny red poles. I am so happy to be with you, I cannot mock you with conviction

BMaj7

Flanagan leaves Ella for New York. Residencies at the Village Vanguard. A basement more hallowed. Home among hard bop giants, Miles, Mingus, Monk. Limelight in soft focus on his piano. No one singing over him. He leads his audience, quiet-like, into the temple of jazz. The room becomes beautiful then.

ii-V-I

The baby died. Late term. Harried by change, I hadn’t registered the stillness. Tig had. On the sofa beside him, a bowl of buttery popcorn between us, I shrug. Little gaffer is probably asleep.

At the hospital, they induce me, but first the pity of the ultrasound tech whose white polyester brushes impersonally against my belly as she reaches for the wand. We wait for the familiar whoosh of my baby’s heart. Oh sweetheart, she says. I’ll go and get your dad.

Tig was filling paperwork. I’m right behind you. He squeezed my hand before she led me into the dark room.

Twelve hours later I deliver a dead boy. I cannot not look at him. Take him away.

Tig names him. I make him swear never to tell me what. The aunties come keening. The uncles huddle, whispering condolences in dark suits that hang loosely on shrinking frames. Strong, work-worn hands clutch Tig’s shoulder.

Their generosity humiliates me. Casseroles pile up in the freezer. I turn away. I cannot stop seeing the pity in that woman’s eyes. The way she thought Tig was my dad.

Fm7 →

Even Tommy’s family confuses his quietness for something lesser. Youngest of six. He doesn’t say anything, goes the family chorus. So, of course, he doesn’t say anything.

See, I told you! they say.

Right. I showed them, he says.

B♭7 →

Wherever we go, people smile at us like they might at newlyweds. Strangers nod because nodding gives them a rub of our magic. In the lodge, the bartender winks. He free pours our cognac into snifters he troubles himself to warm. The whole world thinks we belong together.

On the second day, we cross-country. Alone in a pine forest, the whoosh of your red-jammied legs makes me giddy. We come to a steep hill. You look back at me. Are you ready for this?

I am not. Then all six feet, five inches of you crouches, and you take the hill like a child, bum touching your skis; poles, tucked in your armpits, fly back like wings. I never love you more than this.

E♭Maj7

My adoptive mother, Harriet, loves crumpets and tidiness. Possibly also the monarchy before Charles’s nasty divorce. An actuary, she is nothing if not precise. She does not abide disorder, but it should be said that she wanted me. Badly, in fact. After a decade of trying, she adopted, swaddled, then sang rocking lullabies to me through six patient months of wailing. Mine. Her husband John, a sensitive introvert, could not stand the endless howl of colic. He left at month five and never came back. I don’t know where he is. Harriet’s disappointments have been many. I am sure she has itemized each one in one of her ledgers, but she did want me. At least at first.

When the baby died, she surprised me with two good pieces of advice: stay with Tig. Go back to school.

ii-V-I

At the Vanguard, owner Max Gordon’s wife, Lorraine, sticks to what she loves. People tell her jazz is dead. Jazz is dead!

Really? she asks. When’s the funeral? Under her direction the club cannot fail.

She calls Tommy thoughtful and beautiful. Hangs a photo of him right above the piano. Now with statesman’s silver mustache, he watches over the room. But plays, she says, eyes closed and into it. Away from us.

C♯m7 →

You don’t know I am adopted, but I know every detail about your crazy old bat (your words) of a mother’s twisted bowels as though she were my own blood. I know how many drops of what tincture she takes when. I know what day she sees her naturopath and her Reiki practitioner.

Because the world insists on driving us together, your old bat also, coincidentally, lives on my street. Washington Street, owned by the university. Sipping goldenrod tea in her dining room, surrounded by jazz records and philodendra, she and I commiserate over rats in basements, racoons in attics, leaking pipes, black mould. She reads me an ode to the purple crocuses that overtake her scrap of a yard every spring. In the ode, Love promenades barefoot through the Annex, dispelling the last of winter’s hoarfrost.

Your obsession with her is hard to miss, but I don’t read misogyny into it like I might. It feels Oedipal to me. A kind of love. You let slip that she wants to know how old I am and if I want children. From this I surmise that your protests, the days and weeks you disappear, aren’t the full picture. You love me.

F♯7

Impossible to know whether Tommy’s obsession with tempo predated “Giant Steps.” The way he drives bop hard into lyric and back again. At home walking or presto. Balliett remarks on the way his double-time phrases race ahead to clear the way. Never static. A restlessness, despite the elegant demeanour.

ii-V

Up in the choir-loft-turned-guest-room, after your show at Ron and Linda’s country church. Benny Goodman’s bright swing beckons from an old transistor radio set. We dance palm to palm. Lindy Hop. Swing out. Coaster step. A moon skims uneven floorboards through the winter window, a cardinal’s hat with stunning tracery. A benediction. We spin. Double time the triple step. Until. Oh yeah, you say. I should know how fast you like it, shouldn’t I? My little two-timer.

You boost me onto the high bed. I want to turn my back to you, but you pin my wrists. Where do you think you’re going? you whisper. You’re mine. The tune changes on the radio, and we discover the thrill of a new threat up on that four-poster antique where choirs used to sing.

V-I

You are the ride I can’t get off until Tig comes from Winnipeg to collect me. He cuts my sabbatical short with a single flight. In the end, it’s Harriet who counsels him to bring me home. She’s gone weedy. Doesn’t know who she is. Best go fetch her. Harriet with her back straight and head high. Tig does not want to know what Harriet suspects about Toronto. He swings a sledgehammer instead.

When I leave, you shrug. It wasn’t meant to be.

I hate you for not fighting. But even my poet, Catullus, the one on whom my living depends, knows that love and hate are complementaries. Odi et amo begins his most famous couplet, I hate and I love. I can’t separate my hate from loving you. I think of you every day and am tortured by it.

V-I

San Francisco Jazz Festival, October, 2001. Maybe it’s a fluke. Flanagan’s last concert is a tribute to Coltrane. Celebrating what would have been John’s seventy-fifth birthday. Tommy gets another shot at “Giant Steps” but opens with “A Love Supreme.” Drummer Elvin Jones: There is no person that I care about more on earth than Tommy Flanagan. I have that feeling about him. It’s just pure love.

Flanagan dies at Mount Sinai, November 16th. Complications. The old heart trouble.

ii-V-I

Iris arrives swiftly. A messenger. Tig and I barely make it to the hospital. My eyes land first on her brow. Fine, arch for a baby, and also fierce, like she’ll count the band in herself.

Eleanor Fuller won The Malahat's 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. She was a finalist in The Fiddlehead's 2023 fiction contest and the 2024 Cambridge Short Prize. You can find her work in The Moth, The Waxed Lemon, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review and The Vassar Review. Fuller completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to volunteer on the Editorial Board at Prism International. She is a 2024 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence and grateful recipient of SSHRC, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council grants. She lives in Toronto.