Rainfall

e-mail between sets. And the crowd is different at the Blue Note, too: first, because you can’t even fit a crowd into Alfie, and second, because the people at Alfie are there only for the music, whereas, at the Blue Note, people also come to be seen.

    I looked around the room as the second-set crowd flowed in, but nothing set off my radar.

    If you wanted to get to her, and you had a choice of seats, where would you go? You’d stay close to one of the entrances to this floor. That would give you an escape route, if you needed one, and it would keep the entire room in front of you, so you could watch everyone else from behind, instead of the reverse.

    I swiveled and looked behind me as though searching for an acquaintance. There was a Japanese man, mid-forties, sitting all the way in the left rear, near one of the exits. The people sitting next to him were all talking to one another; he was obviously alone. He was wearing a rumpled suit, dark blue or gray, which fit him like an afterthought. His expression was bland, too bland for my taste. This was a crowd composed of enthusiasts, sitting in twos and threes, waiting eagerly for the performance. Mr. Bland felt like he was deliberately trying to be unobtrusive. I filed him as a strong possible.

    I swiveled in the other direction. Same seat, right rear. Three young women who looked like office ladies on a night out. No apparent problem there.

    Mr. Bland would be able to watch me throughout the performance, and I needed to avoid the mistake of conspicuous aloneness that he had made. I told the people around me that I was a friend of Midori’s and was here at her invitation; they started asking me questions, and pretty soon we were shooting the shit like old friends.

    A waitress came by and I ordered a twelve-year-old Cragganmore. The people around me all followed suit. I was a friend of Kawamura Midori’s, so whatever I had ordered, it must be cool. They probably didn’t know whether they had just ordered scotch, vodka, or a new kind of beer.

    When Midori and her trio walked down the side of the room, everyone started clapping. Another thing about Alfie: There, when the musicians first appear, the room fills with reverential silence.

    Midori took her place at the piano. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a black velvet blouse, low cut and clinging, her skin dazzling white next to it. She tilted her head forward and touched her fingers to the keys, and the audience grew silent, expectant. She spent a long moment frozen that way, staring at the piano, and then began.

    She started slowly, with a coy rendering of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” but overall she played harder than she had at Alfie, with more abandon, her notes sometimes struggling with the bass and the drums, but finding a harmony in the opposition. Her riffs were angry and she rode them longer, and when she came back the notes were sweet but you could still sense a frustration, a pacing beneath the surface.

    The set lasted for ninety minutes, and the music alternated between a smoky, melodic sound, then elegiac sadness, then a giddy, laughing exuberance that shook the sadness away. Midori finished in a mad, exhilarated riff, and when it was over the applause was unrestrained. Midori stood to acknowledge it, bowing her head. The drummer and bass guitarist were laughing and wiping dripping sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs, and the applause went on and on. What Midori felt when she played, the place her music took her, she had taken the audience there, and the clapping was filled with real gratitude. When it finally faded, Midori and her trio left the stage, and people started to get up and move about.

    A few minutes later she reappeared and squeezed in next to me. Her face was still flushed from the performance. “I thought I saw you here,” she said, giving me a mild check with her shoulder. “Thank you for coming.”

    “Thank you for inviting me. They were expecting me at the ticket window.”

    She smiled. “If I hadn’t told them, you wouldn’t have gotten in, and you can’t hear the music very well from the street, can you?”

    “No, the reception is certainly better from where I’m sitting,” I said, looking around as though taking in the grandeur of the Blue Note, but in fact scoping for Mr. Bland.

    “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked. “I’m going to grab something with the band.”

    I hesitated. I wasn’t going to have a chance