When she first sees Sol, he’s telling stories at a party, a party for musicians. All the players sit in the living room, drinking beer and telling jokes. Some of them tell musical jokes, humming the punch lines from albums which appear to be sacred. They are happy people. They have shine in their eyes, they rock.
Sol is among them, a black man, at least sixty, neither heavyset nor thin. His gray afro is a small, misty nimbus. He is telling a story about an old musician who made a living by tap-dancing and singing. The man’s routine consisted of singing “Sunny Side of the Street” or some other ripe standard from the 1920s. After singing the melody (the “head,” as Sol calls it), his friend would trade solos with the drummer. The drummer would play eight measures of free improvisation, and the tap-dancer would echo — to infinite perfection — those rhythms with his feet. Sol says the man played all the clubs on the Cape, and in Nantasket; he loved beach towns.
