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The Lick

A Someone's PC Tale - Inspired by an idea by Clawdragons

By Dark Violet

“Listen…"

The large record began to spin in lazy, undulating circles - matte-black shellac, rather than the newer vinyl. A tanned and wrinkled hand plucked up the arm and placed it on the grooves.

Plucked, bassy cello strings and the hiss of brushes on cymbals rose from the record player's horn. A piano was dancing away, swaying around the melody like a stream meandering through a valley. The tapping drumbeat added an easy, invigorating bounciness that you had to tap your foot too. This was jazz - but not jazz in the way that some music wears it, like cheap clothing, the rolling easy-listening fashion of a modern coffee shop. This was jazz in its soul, in its roots - the band music that brought to mind old theaters, music halls, deep-red curtains and art-deco fittings, a crowd of well-suited ladies and gentlemen unconsciously twitching their fingers and nodding their heads to the beat.

The wrinkled hand raised a finger. “Just here."

The piano trailed off into the lower octaves, its echo fading into the clicking and cracking of the old record - and in its place, the brassy notes of a saxophone rose. It started a very deliberate, precise tune - one that stepped casually, effortlessly through the tune, in the same way one would flitter through downtown at night-

Suddenly to be interrupted by a spike, a sharp spiral of pitch - the street walker had leapt into the air, reaching for the gleaming lamps far above - only to suddenly calm back down to the walk from before.

The finger conducted a tiny, imaginary orchestra. “And just like that, the jazz scene changed in an instant."

He turned the record down, and leaned back in the red-swathed chair, broad smile beaming. With his pale white hair, thinning on top, and his dark suit with a deep maroon tie that caught the crew's camera lights in a delicate shine, he was the picture of a professor of a college of music. Which is what the banner would read on the bottom of the screen, and it wouldn't be a coincidence. His decades of experience could be read in the wrinkles of his face like tree rings in a revered campus yew.

“And that was the first instance of the Lefevre Lick?" asked the pale woman sitting on the opposite side of the record player, a simple pad on her knees with a pen laid across. She watched the professor with active eyes from beneath a curtain of straight blond hair.

“Very first, yes, indeed. We know of seven recordings of Ella Lefevre's work, of which only three are extant. But contemporary accounts mention this tune specifically as being the one where they first heard it, indeed. The lick itself was revolutionary; it contains a particular sharp rise in the notes, a major depart from the melody. To the unattuned ear, it could be considered a mistake, and I've heard it referred to as a squeal before - a better description would be a gasp, I would say - but the frequency in the song, and that same climb, the suddenness, happening so early and then over and over later in short, sudden bursts - it's novel, nothing less than an inspired use of the instrument that no-one of her time had even thought of doing."

He leaned forwards, hands dancing. At his feet, a brown-furred Furfrou, muzzle dusted with so much silver it looked like he'd been in the pantry, glanced up at them. “Indeed, it started a trend of copycats, and for the next decade other artists tried to replicate it - Earl Barker, Joseph Darvisham, Cassius Carlson. But none quite managed to capture the…" he pinched his fingers together, peering intensely as if trying to recall some half-forgotten taste. “...the essence of what Lefevre did, in my opinion, indeed."

In the background, the music danced on. The saxophone strode through the latter half of the piece, interrupted sporadically with those leaps of notes, the brief, breathless intakes in their wake barely-heard before the player picked up the melody again.

“It was the way they seem… unplanned. They interrupt, they capture your attention with how unexpected they are, how they shoot through your body like an electric shock. And they come faster, the density increasing, like it's building and building to a peak, until - ahh…"

He laid back in his chair again, letting out a satisfied breath, eyebrows fluttering.

“It's sublime, inspired indeed, and it really was one of the most significant, most important moments in jazz which moved the genre into what it would blossom into in the early half of the twentieth century."

The woman opposite him glanced down at her notes, shifting the pen away from the next line. A smile shimmied on her lips. “So, do we know how Ella Lefevre came up with the lick? What did she have to say about it?"

“Ah, therein lies the tragedy of the tale, indeed," the professor said, hands landing on the arms of the plush seat. “Ella Lefevre never found fame in her lifetime, and barely had the money to pay for the few recordings she could get. She died long before the Lefevre Lick became the phenomenon it developed into, and the one first-hand account we have where she talks about the piece - in a letter to a close friend of hers - all that was said was that her friends were… well, language that would be uncouth to repeat, indeed! And, what's more, that she dedicated the piece to be a testament to their friendship. For almost a century now, people have puzzled over that description, and what precisely it means, especially for a reclusive woman who seemed to have a very close, indeed even secretive, social circle."

He settled down into the seat, eyebrows twitching, as if a soundbite had sparked in his mind. “In the end, it's one of the many mysteries - indeed, we may never truly know what inspired the Lefevre Lick…"

***

Oh, those bastards.

Ella swirled the saxophone's bell through the air as she started on her solo, the drums and cello fading in the background. She opened one eye to glare at the door at the far end of the recording booth, and the snickering faces pressed against the gap in it.

Between her and them was Lucile, happily trotting in though the door which had just been opened. The long-furred Boltund beamed up at her, tail wagging, black lips spread into a broad smile as she padded happily across the studio.

The microphones would hear the clicking of her claws on the wood, for one thing. Plus, she needed to concentrate! It had cost a week's wages at the factory to get this half-hour in the booth - she only had one shot. Sammy should know that most of all. She couldn't keep her focus on the melody with-

Lucile's cold nose found the gap in her skirt, and took no time delving right past it.

Ella's eyes shot open, fingers clutching the saxophone reflexively. The instrument squealed in her grasp, and it took her a few beats to get herself back under control. She took in a deep breath, glaring into space in front of her, her ears still ringing from the sharp sound.

Play on, she told herself. For God's sake, play on.

Not that it was easy, when her girlfriend had just started lapping away beneath her skirt, and the only thing that separated that familiar tongue from the warm folds beneath was a thin string of fabric already soaked through by doggy saliva.

Oh, those rats. They were probably laughing it up. She cracked open an eye again, and - yep, there they were, faces creased in stifled laughter, white teeth flashing in the darkness behind the crack in the doorway.

Friends…

She continued the wandering melody, her fingers carrying on their well-trodden journey up and down the keys. Lucile was nosing now around the fabric, tasting for smells there. Ella could focus if she stayed like that. As long as that tongue quested no higher, back towards the little hood, to the quavering nub beneath-

YEP, just like that! Ella jolted, another screech leaping from the saxophone. An electric shock zapped through her arms, leaving her shoulders tingling. She pulled the mouthpiece from her lips, taking a deep and shaky breath before continuing.

She couldn't be too mad. There were countless others out there that wouldn't be so accepting of her relationship. This lot, meanwhile… but then, they were like her - Jessica had her Poochyena, Sammy hoped to find the right Zebstrika someday, and Sandra joked about how her and her Gardevoir seemed so out of place by comparison…

So, with no time to start it all again from the top, and no wish to ruin a perfectly good recording with expletives, there was nothing else for it but to just keep on goin'.

So that's why Ella stood there, in a run-down, half-price basement recording booth, between peeling paint and cheap light bulbs, her pawn shop saxophone in her hands, her found kin gleefully watching through the door, and her Boltund girlfriend lapping happily, obliviously away in her nethers.

That's why every lap between the folds that landed just right - every flick of drool against her clit, every brush of that cold nose against her lips - sent her instrument half-leaping out of her hands, sent the needle on the record dancing, cutting valleys so sharp you could see them. That's why what was meant to be an exploration through a carefully crafted melody, elegantly mapped out through dozens of early mornings and late nights, humming to herself in the small hours between sleep and work - all of that became interrupted, wrenched aside, by the brassy moans and gasps of a lover's licks…

She let it happen, even as her body tingled, trembled, as a shudder that started in chest began to spread to her hands, mounting with each exploratory lap. The practiced motions they indulged in night after night were now on full display, the pink tongue disappearing over and over between folds of dark nethers, full of warmth and heat and drips down her thighs.

And as the piece began to close out, the piano and the drums and the cello all made their crescendos and slipped towards their codas. Meanwhile Ella barely kept her grasp on the beat, holding onto the last vestiges of the melody as spotlights flashed in her vision - and her saxophone leapt and shouted in delight, as she almost doubled-over onto her canine paramour-

Oh, beautiful bastards, the lot of them.

And as her chest heaved, and the last few notes eked out from between trembles and twitches, her body still rolling in waves of sublime pleasure…

She figured, hey. At least she was just this unknown, underground saxophonist.

Imagine if anyone actually heard this recording…

Fin