100 Cocktails Later

100 Cocktails Later Competition Entry

Cocktails

It’s tough sometimes, sitting at the piano while the office workers at BMW knock back the cocktails at the launch of the new Mini Clubman. We’re in an over-lit showroom aquarium, a vortex of dazzling reflections enfolding the party. I am playing in a far corner, well removed from the temporary bar where the young up-comers swagger in their finery sipping Green Fairies, Bloody Marys, and Tequila Mockingbirds.

Look, I don’t mind the fact that they don’t take much notice of me. That’s the deal, after all. For my part, I don’t have to spend my days in an open plan office like an overworked battery hen. I get to run feral from one bleak joint to another, scraping a few quid from the corporate economy.

I sometimes wonder why they bother with me, though. They show little sign of appreciating the swinging left hand and the subtle timing of the right, working in counterpoint against the stalking bass lines. They engage me, perhaps, because of an ancestral memory of a non-digital music from a pre-corporate economy. Even 21st Century Schizoid Man likes to go retro sometimes, to taste something richer from older, deeper, soil.

And it gives the guys and dames a chance put on some glad rags. There are some fine sequined dresses hugging art-deco bodies, statuesque as they pose with triangular glasses filled with a colourful variety of synthesised poisons, adorned with parasols and plastic monkeys. The chaps like to pose too, their bow-ties casually undone in a hopeful gesture towards the sartorial. Both genders gravitate to the freshly unveiled Mini, a neat little red number static on the polished marble floor, a drop of blood on a microscope slide. The scene has the gorgeous superficiality of a Jack Vettriano painting.

We have been worshipers of the car for over a hundred years now and our lust for speed and status is not likely to be tempered by the prospect of imminent planetary collapse. The vengeful gods are the more exciting.

The girls gather round the crouching vehicle, fluted wine-glass frocks spiralling round slender forms. What do I have to offer them?

Perhaps I myself am the offering.

They have their gods and I have mine. When I started out, I played in city centre pubs, thick with smoke and beer fumes. I sold my self to the great jazz pianists of the past. Well, in reality I had no choice - they captured my imagination, invaded my psyche, usurped my ego. I had to follow them on this daft quest for the grail of Jazz Realisation.

I wonder if I seem just a little bit dangerous, a washed-up relic from smoky days? I’ve tried to go all the way with it, but in truth I haven’t made it. I wake up each morning with the desolate realisation that I am just a side-man in the theatre of the jazz scene. “I am not Prince Louis” and “I will never play The Duke”. Indeed, I will never achieve the perfection of the new Mini Clubman.

There he sits - a perfect car, perfect in every part, chrome tigering the sleek, steel flanks. Perfect.

These cocktail girls could be seen as hand-maidens to the machine gods. But who now possesses the nicer curves? Nature born female or digitally designed car? Soon both car and human will be software-designed perfections of sterility.

I don’t have their resources of course, being a one-man band forcing stiffening fingers into ever more refined shapes. Perhaps I have used too much ego in this quest for the musical Sublime. Maybe I should have given my subconscious freer reign in the early days, drunk more beer and smoked more cigars when I could. The famous ticklers of old fuelled their creativity with moonshine whisky and reefers. All creativity requires artificial means of a kind. This smug, seamless mini was brought about by a billion algorithmic sub-programs, a vast intoxication of design. And we are intoxicated.

I wander over to the bar. Is there still time to launch myself at greatness, fuelled by these dainty vases, amphoras and phials filled with their rainbow poisons?

I won’t get there. My playing lacks the mechanical ease of the Mini, does not possess the elegance of the art-deco female form glittering beyond me in the glass nebula. A vast collective psychic greed fuels the creation of the gods vehicular and though they promise destruction, the workforce attends them like fairies to Titania. The vengeful gods are the more alluring.

Ah, forget it. I am not part of any design of Nature or Machine. Nowadays I envy everything perfect and everyone who creates perfection. I stopped this morning to watch a man laying a precise course of bricks. I saw workmen resurfacing a road into a smooth, black river of tarmac. I observed flawless leaf-hands of chestnut tree and the winking symmetrical wings of a peacock butterfly.

And I have to confess I was jealous. It is hard to love these stiffening fingers driven by an ageing nervous system and a darkening heart.

Shall I take the green venom, the blood of Mary and the synthetic cactus sun-rise? Shall I fuel a last desperate push towards syncopated crystallisation?

Like most musicians, I do not expect own a mini or an art-deco trophy-bride. I should forget the quest for the True Blood and sip from more tangible vessels.

A flight over the cocktail rainbow will surely bring me to perfect oblivion at last.

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