DIXIELAND

Friday night in a West Australian basement, and the six-man jazz band is playing Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans to sixty people who entered through a red phone box, ready to drink and dance like they were other people, and it was a different time and place. All the heat of the day is trapped in that room, and the place smells like sweat and brass. When the band members introduce the numbers, their accents are broad Australian, but when they sing it’s pure Dixieland.

The elderly doorman is dancing slow swing with a young woman in a sequined dress. Then the girl in the polka-dot dress, and the girl in the red lace dress. He switches girls after every song. All the girls are big-calved and soft-looking, and he moves them around the old floorboards with a sad grace. He still wears his wedding ring, and when the band plays Sweet Lorraine he stops dancing. He always sits out for Sweet Lorraine and watches the band from a small table that he and his wife donated to the club in the eighties. The table once contained an antique sewing machine, but the sewing machine is gone and all that remains is the wrought-iron foot pedal, and an iron wheel that is beautiful and useless. He presses the foot pedal in time with the music and the wheel spins around but it isn’t...