The players who had arrived too late sat at the tables and booths, waiting their turn. They sat impatiently and drank dime beers or bottles of tonic, and, lighting one cigarette after the other, they filled up the glass ashtrays before them. The ceiling fans were turned to their highest settings; they broke apart the smoke but didn’t do much to the heat. A soprano-sax player, Jimmy Rollins, called out to the owner of the club: “Hey, Moody, I feel a chill in the air. How about firing up that furnace.” Moody responded with a dismissive shake of the head and went back to scrubbing down the bar top with wood soap, the pine scent both medicinal and heady. Other than the musky stink of himself and the rest of the musicians onstage, Dante didn’t smell much of anything. He sat behind the old, beaten-up piano and played with an intensity that he hadn’t felt in quite some time. Some of the young players eyed him up and down, skeptical of a white guy leading the rhythm section.
