It began, as many minor disasters do, with an email I half-read.
We’d been invited to something called a Noche del Alma—”Night of the Soul,” which already sounded like the kind of thing Patricia would adore and I would endure. A gathering “under the stars, with soulful offerings,” it said. Patricia was sold. She made lemon tartlets. I, in a moment of caffeine-fuelled inspiration, decided to bring my 1973 Sun Ra Space Is the Place vinyl and a portable turntable that hadn’t worked properly since before Brexit.
We drove out to a finca somewhere between here and nowhere. One of those places with a gravel driveway that insists on reshuffling your internal organs. The house was modest, low-slung, covered in jasmine, and crawling with the kind of people who own hemp scarves and say things like “sound baths” without irony.
At the entrance, we were greeted by a man who introduced himself only as “Mariposa.” He wore a robe and no shoes. I introduced myself, but midway through saying my full name, he hugged me so hard I forgot how it ended. Patricia whispered, “Just go with it.”
Inside, the place smelled of patchouli and baked aubergine. There was a makeshift stage—a few Persian rugs, a microphone that clearly hadn’t worked since Franco died, and a stool holding a singing bowl. Everyone was laying their “soulful offerings” on a central table. Homemade wine. Poems scribbled on parchment. A woman laid down a single feather.
I placed Space Is the Place gingerly on the table next to a man who’d brought three dozen empanadas and looked at me like I was lost.
“Ah,” he said. “Experimental jazz.”
“Cosmic,” I replied. “Very spiritual.”
“No doubt,” he said, in the way people do when they are deeply, profoundly full of doubt.
Someone lit candles. Someone else played the hang drum. A woman began a poem about the sea being a metaphor for generational trauma. It went on for ten minutes. The mosquitoes applauded.
Then it was my turn. Patricia, betraying me with a smile, gave a little clap.
I set the record on the portable turntable, flipped the switch—and nothing. No hum. No spin. I tapped it. I jiggled wires. I whispered sweet nothings. Still nothing.
Mariposa glided over. “It’s okay, brother. Let the music live in you.”
“Right,” I said. “Problem is, I brought vinyl. It’s not… wireless.”
Someone handed me a bongo drum. Someone else began plucking an out-of-tune guitar. Then someone started whistling Coltrane—Naima, I think—badly but earnestly. The whole thing fell apart into a kind of joyful racket. I closed my eyes. Let go.
It wasn’t music, exactly. But it wasn’t nothing either.
And then—somewhere amid the chaos—I started singing.
Not words. Not lyrics. Just something half-remembered, half-improvised, probably lifted from a Thelonious Monk scat I’d heard in 1982. But I sang. Patricia looked at me like I’d grown wings. Mariposa closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his chest. The woman with the feather wept openly.
Afterwards, as we sat outside, chewing on someone’s beetroot-and-something muffins, Patricia leaned in and said, “You forgot your name earlier.”
“I did?”
“You introduced yourself as Charles Mingus.”
I shrugged. “Could be worse.”
She took my hand. “You’ve still got it, you know.”
I didn’t ask what “it” was. I didn’t want to know. I just looked out at the olive trees under the stars and let the air hum.
It wasn’t Ronnie Scott’s. It wasn’t a record spinning on perfect Hi-Fi.
But for one strange night in the groves, it was enough.
