Free Soul Siren by Aisha Duquesne

She cracked me up because she did Erroll Garner, complete with his stride playing and groaning. It was a hell of a performance.”
    Erica remembers it differently. She claims she never burst in on Morgan and “took over” his piano, but she does admit he’s quoted her accurately. And she did play for him.
    When she was done strutting her stuff, Morgan took a long pull of his cigarette and said, “Okay, I believe you.”
    “Believe what?” she asked.
    “I believe you’re Duane Jones’s kid,” said Morgan.
    Erica’s father and Morgan had played together when they were young. They were bandmates and used to collaborate on song efforts. Morgan would expect his old friend’s little girl to grow up hearing jazz legends, and in one line, he let her know that playing them back note for note didn’t impress him.
    “So what did you come to me for?” he asked, still slumped on the couch with his abandoned book on, of all things, Australia. Morgan had eclectic tastes. His bookshelf had a lot of history, but you could find him reading Agatha Christie novels, a book on the behaviour of bees, a history of the Napoleonic wars.
    “My Dad told me I should come to you.”
    “That’s not an answer,” replied Morgan. “That’s a course of action. I asked about the motive.”
    “I want to record,” said Erica, feeling embarrassed because a big dream like this always sounds ridiculous when you have to blurt it out. “I write songs, but I think I can write them better.”
    “
Ohhhhhh,
you want to be a star!” said Morgan. “Duane lives in Toronto, right? That’s where you’re from? Canada? Go home to Toronto, Anna—”
    “Erica.”
    “Gimme a break, kid. I haven’t had so much as a postcard from your Dad in five years. Fuck me if I have to remember the name of his kids. I am
not
in the lottery business. I do session recordings. I play with small combos for shit on Wednesdays. I do arrangements. Now and again—very, very rarely—I get asked to compose a little instrumental background music for TV shows filmed here. That’s like your wannabe novelist buying his groceries by writing greeting cards. ’Kay?”
    Erica didn’t move.
    Morgan grew irritable. “
What
do you think I can teach you? I do jazz. Jazz is precise. Jazz is
clean
. You can be sloppy all you want with pop music, A-B rhymes, three goddamn chords if you want, and we won’t get into the bullshit of rapping—”
    “You do music,” Erica cut in. “I hear it in my head, new things, scraps of melodies, and I need to tap into it better, use it better.”
    Morgan nodded with a sigh and told her, “You know, I think it was Elton John or somebody who said he tripped on the formula for making popular songs by using the structure of a hymn. So there you are. All the Zen I can give you. Bye now.”
    “How about this,” said Erica. “You’re the only person I know in New York.”
    “Starbucks. Sixth Avenue, Midtown. Guys will want to pick you up in no time.”
    She was getting nowhere. So she turned on her heel and stomped back into the freight elevator.
    I’ve heard there is an old Japanese tradition with teaching, and since Morgan read so much, maybe he happened upon it and decided to adopt it. Or maybe in truth, he couldn’t be bothered with her that day. The tradition is that the master always says no the first time, the second time, the third, until the student makes such a pest of himself or hangs around so pitifully for so long that the master sees that the student is actually sincere.
    Erica haunted a jazz club where Morgan played, a basement joint in Morningside Heights so it could pick up the college crowd, and when he was on a break, she crept over and put one of her compositions over his sheet music. To her surprise, he sat down and started to play her song as an instrumental, then ignored her bridge completely and improvised something completely different, shaking it up, showing her new paths to consider. But when she turned up on his