Star-Crossed Lovers
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman“Star-Crossed Lovers” is a Duke Ellington composition whose unexpected performance by Tommy Flanagan transforms a listener’s private fantasy into a real, memorable moment. The piece matters not only as one of two songs the narrator hopes to hear, but as the first half of a coincidence so unlikely—and so musically satisfying—that it becomes the evening’s defining event.
The imagined request
The narrator is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attends a performance by Tommy Flanagan at the Regattabar Jazz Club alone. Flanagan is one of his favorite pianists, but the set initially disappoints: it lacks the special quality he had expected, and as the performance nears its end, the narrator grows almost panicky at the prospect of leaving with little worth remembering. He knows he may never see Flanagan play live again.
In that anxious pause, the narrator imagines being asked to choose two songs. After considering the possibility, he settles on “Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Barbados.” They are not typical requests: “Star-Crossed Lovers” is rarely heard, and the narrator doubts most listeners have encountered it. His choice is grounded in Flanagan’s earlier recordings, not in a wish for a familiar standard or a showpiece.
A composition in Flanagan’s recorded past
Flanagan had recorded “Star-Crossed Lovers” in 1968 on the album Encounter!, with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. The narrator especially admires the pianist’s crisp, intelligent solo on the piece, brief but memorable. That earlier recording gives the imagined request a particular personal history: the song is not simply an obscure title, but one associated with a performance the narrator has long loved.
The imagined encounter remains explicitly a fantasy. The narrator pictures Flanagan approaching his table to ask for two titles, while knowing there is essentially no chance that this will happen. The scene therefore sets private desire against the ordinary distance between performer and listener.
The song is played
Without speaking to the narrator or even glancing in his direction, Flanagan begins the final two numbers of the set with “Star-Crossed Lovers,” played as a ballad, and follows it with an up-tempo “Barbados.” The first song arrives exactly as the narrator had privately chosen it, though no request was actually made.
The coincidence is extraordinary precisely because the two titles were unlikely selections from the enormous range of jazz repertoire. Yet the narrator’s emphasis is not on coincidence alone: Flanagan’s performances of both pieces are amazing. The set that had threatened to end as a letdown instead gives the narrator the vivid, lasting musical memory he had feared losing.
Significance
“Star-Crossed Lovers” links an earlier recorded performance to a live encounter in Cambridge, joining the narrator’s long-standing attachment to Flanagan’s playing with a moment of chance. Its appearance does not validate the imagined conversation—the pianist never asks for a request—but makes that fantasy feel uncannily answered without any communication between them.
The song also anchors the reversal in the episode: anticipation gives way to disappointment, then to wonder when the exact, unlikely music the narrator had hoped for is played. The piece’s force in the story comes from that conjunction of remembered admiration, private expectation, coincidence, and a performance that finally exceeds expectation.
