Head On - Bobby Hutcherson (1971)

[Just for a moment, Me and Duggie are back. Laying on Duggie's bed. They've had a few beers. It's Thursday night, 'the girls' are off late-night shopping, or something. They've taken the kids with them.]

Duggie's mate has been itching.

Sorry, I mean he's been itching to play this new CD that he's carrying around.

Bobby Hutcherson on the Vibes back in 1971. 'Head On'.

“'s 'is must udventurous wurk,” says Duggie's mate.

Duggie, trys to sit up, spilling the remains of a can of Fosters on the duvet, “Y' jest red that sumwear, y'dick 'ed.”

“Nur, nuh.” syad Duggie's mate. “Nur. 's rev.rev.revo. It's revolootionry vibes, man.”

Duggie has a little bedside CD player and his mate slots the CD in.

The first track of Head On: 'At The Source' starts up. A few squeezed notes, opening into a mellow vibraphone riff, then moving to blusey free jazz and a bass solo.

“Kinda chall'nging,” says Duggie's mate.

Duggie's snoring, blowing lager bubbles through his nostrils.

“I mean, I'm getting more inta, or outa jazz these, um, daze. Y' know?”

Now it's gone all high-speed bing bong playing.

Duggie grunts and wakes: “what's that diggin' in me 'ead. Like a drill.”

“It's a marimba solo. Bobby Hutcherson. Hutch? Yeh?”

Within seconds Duggie is snoring again.

Duggie's mate was drawn to the CD first of all by listening to a jazz show on Radio 3. Then he googled Bobby Hutcherson and saw a cool photo of the front cover of 'Head On'. It shows Bobby wearing an orange woolly hat and clutching his head like he's a school kid who's forgotten his packed lunch or something. Highly cool to Duggie's mate.

Music: swirling and twirling through the hard bop landscape, the early 1970s, inner-cities still scarred by degrading slums. Docks are a series of vacant spaces in varying degrees of dilapidation and squatted occupation. There's a fog over New York and no one has noticed (or is Duggie's mate now getting confused by memories of early episodes of Kojak? “Who Loves Ya Baby?”). Perhaps it's the beer affecting his brain cells. Making the wrong connections.

And the music continues to move, grooving a course of crashing cymbals and roaming bass lines and the globble bobble of the vibes. Even Duggie's renewed snoring somehow complements the seedy burps of Harold Land's sax.

The streetlamp casts a white light over Duggie's bed, illuminating one of his toes as it peeks though a hole in his sock.