Tommy Flanagan's unexpected song choices

Tommy Flanagan's unexpected song choices turn an evening of musical disappointment into a striking coincidence: without being asked or even looking toward the narrator, Flanagan plays the two pieces the narrator has just imagined requesting. The episode is one of the narrator’s deliberately modest strange experiences, and its force lies in the exactness of the match between a private wish and an unprompted performance.

Setting and Expectations

From 1993 to 1995, the narrator lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a writer-in-residence at a college and worked on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In Harvard Square, the Regattabar Jazz Club offered live performances in a comfortable, relaxed setting, with famous musicians and a reasonable cover charge. The narrator’s visit to hear Flanagan was therefore both an ordinary night out and an occasion loaded with anticipation: Flanagan was one of his favorite jazz pianists.

His wife had other plans that evening, so he went alone. He settled at a table near the stage with a glass of California Merlot and listened to Flanagan’s trio. He valued Flanagan’s playing as an accompanist for its warmth, depth, and steadiness, and especially admired his solos. Those expectations sharpened the disappointment when the performance seemed to lack the extra, almost magical element the narrator associated with the pianist. The music was not bad, but the set was drawing toward its end without becoming the experience he had hoped for.

The Unspoken Request

As the set continued without improving, disappointment gave way to anxiety. The narrator feared that the evening would end in lukewarm memories—or leave him with no lasting memory of the performance at all—and recognized that he might never have another chance to hear Flanagan live. In fact, he never did. He began privately imagining a request: if Flanagan asked him to choose two numbers, which would they be?

The choices were “Barbados” and “Star-Crossed Lovers,” two comparatively unlikely selections rather than obvious crowd-pleasers. “Barbados” was written by Charlie Parker; “Star-Crossed Lovers” was by Duke Ellington. The narrator’s preference was personal and specific. He had especially loved Flanagan’s concise, crisp, intelligent solos on both recordings, and had been thinking that hearing those two numbers would make the evening perfect.

Those performances belonged to different moments in Flanagan’s recording career. He played “Barbados” on the 1957 album Dial JJ 5 as pianist with the J. J. Johnson Quintet, and recorded “Star-Crossed Lovers” on the 1968 album Encounter! with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. Across a long career as a sideman in various groups, Flanagan had played and recorded countless pieces; it was the particular solos on these two tracks that made the narrator’s imagined request so exact. Yet the narrator knew there was virtually no chance that Flanagan would approach his table and invite him to choose the set’s final numbers. The wish remained entirely private.

The Coincidence and Its Effect

Without a word to the narrator, and without even glancing in his direction, Flanagan began the set’s final two pieces. He played “Star-Crossed Lovers” first as a ballad, then followed it with an up-tempo “Barbados.” The sequence fulfilled the narrator’s unspoken choice, though in reverse order from the way he had named the pieces in his thoughts. He sat with his wineglass in hand, speechless.

The coincidence mattered not simply because two familiar songs appeared, but because these two unusual choices—drawn from the millions of numbers Flanagan might have played—were precisely the ones the narrator had just selected for his fantasy request. The narrator emphasizes that Flanagan’s performances were also amazing. The evening thus reversed its course: what had seemed likely to end as a letdown became a rare live performance and the vivid memory the narrator had been afraid he would lack.

Place in the Narrator’s Account

The narrator introduces the episode among small, strange experiences he considers suitable for a preface to a tale. He distinguishes these trifling incidents from life-changing experiences, which he says would take up most of his allotted space. His difficulty in getting people to believe his written account also frames the story: because he is a novelist, listeners tend to assume that what he says has been invented. By presenting the encounter as a modest personal experience rather than a grand revelation, he preserves its unresolved quality. The event offers no explanation for why Flanagan chose those songs; its significance rests on the intimate precision of the coincidence and on how completely the music exceeded the narrator’s expectation.