Malmö, Sweden
1986
The clarinet felt heavy and awkward in his hands, but the others were all ready to go and watching him expectantly, so Emil fumbled with the mouthpiece for a moment longer to get the reed into just the right position and then brought the instrument up to his lips.
With that, the “Malmö Musikers” were off, in their first jam session in probably twenty years, Sigrun and Mikkel letting forth mighty blasts on their trumpets, Reynir making his bull fiddle sing despite his arthritis-gnarled fingers, Tuuri pounding away at the drums and almost losing her coke-bottle glasses every few seconds, Lalli shifting effortlessly between xylophone, vibraphone and marimba, and Emil plugging away on his clarinet, a flute and a sax near to hand for him to switch to at need.
They were back at what had been Trond’s Place, which had changed owners and styles more times in the intervening years than Emil had cared to keep track of; the new owners had brought the old name and style back as a way to stand out from the crowd, and so they’d offered what seemed to Emil a truly obscene amount of money to get the Musikers back together.
Emil was actually making fewer mistakes than he’d feared, though any were too many for his tastes; most of the audience looked like they didn’t know he was making any, though he knew that the others were catching each and every one, and especially Sigrun. Most of the audience probably didn’t know any real jazz pieces other than “Minnie the Moocher”, either, which was why they had started the set with it.
The audience applauded at the end of that piece, some politely, some enthusiastically, but the next piece actually brought some cheers along with the expected chuckles. Who knew that “The Flintstones” still had a Swedish fanbase? Heartened, the Musikers gave it their all, two octogenarians, two septuagenarians and two sexagenarians doing their best to put musicians half their ages to shame.
The applause was much more genuine this time around as the Musikers went into one of their old “bragging” numbers. Sigrun had started calling a few of their better numbers that after Mikkel had pointed out how each of them got to take the lead for a bit in them, instead of only showing off Sigrun, Emil, Lalli, or (much more rarely) Reynir. These were mostly their own “compositions”, born of late-night jam sessions caught on a creaky wire recorder and transcribed to sheet music by Mikkel and Tuuri; in the later days of the Musikers, Mancini had come out with some nice pieces which tended to give each part a chance to shine, but they were just too utterly sixties for the Musikers.
Emil had forgotten just how fun playing with the Musikers was when it was good like this; unfortunately, and especially at the end, it hadn’t always been good like this. Emil was a poor correspondent, but he’d written to the Hotakainens on a fairly regular basis, though most of the replies were from Tuuri alone. Emil glanced back at Lalli, who was thoroughly engrossed in his pit semi-solo.
The set ended with “Swinging on a Star”, another piece the Musikers could have done in their sleep; fortunately so, because they were all exhausted, most of them not having performed at all for a decade or more. Even so, they ended on a high note that kept them on a post-performance high long enough for them to take their bows and slowly creak their way off the stage without incident—even Reynir, who had been leaning on his bull fiddle pretty heavily at the end.
Backstage, everything was mostly the same, too. There simply wasn’t enough room in the building to allow for an adequate set of dressing rooms, but the Musikers made do, as they always had. Unfortunately, their varying states of decrepitude meant “making do” required assistance from various family members shanghaied into helping them; this meant the dressing room was even more tightly packed than they remembered.
Emil was huffing and puffing, his wind not being what it once had been, so he only managed a faint “Sorry” when he got crushed up against Lalli, who let out an aggrieved “Mrh!” in response. Lalli was being aided by his daughter, Aino, while Emil’s grandson Emil, who was supposed to be helping his grandfather, stared at her in a particularly fatuous way. The elder Emil grunted at the folly of youth at the same time as Lalli did. They smiled at each other for a moment before Aino bustled Lalli out the back door to their waiting car…
