Edmonton’s Yardbird Suite felt like a place that already knew why you were there. Ten tickets short of a sellout. Todd and Leah ran the night with a kind of hospitality that holds everything together. You feel taken care of before you even know what you need. The backstage walls covered in graffiti like CBGB’s, not something you expect from a jazz room until you realize improvisation isn’t always polite. Todd made a simple joke about Mike’s last name early on. The kind of thing that usually passes through the air and disappears. This time it landed wrong. Mike took it personally, and for a moment the evening tilted. It’s amazing how fragile the beginning of a show can be. One small crack and you wonder if the whole thing will shift off course.

But cooler heads prevailed. The music settled him. That’s usually the correction mechanism. Caleb the sound man was a young saxophonist. He loved the show. Not just doing a job. Engaged. Listening. The piano tuner, cheerful older guy seemed pleased his work was being used for something real. These details matter more than they should. After my set a man wanted to talk Cecil Taylor. A certain kind of listener brings that name into a room, it’s never casual.

A lot of t-shirts sold and all my books are gone now. Brought 50 should have brought 75. That’s its own strange milestone. Carry these things across the country and suddenly they’re not yours anymore. I liked Todd immediately. We shared some internal map of Canadian music. Earlier I accidentally saw the Chai Pig mural on Whyte Avenue and mentioned it to him. His face shifted into that specific sadness of someone who knows the story. Some references don’t need explanation.

After the show, long after the conversations wound down, I realized I’d lost my phone charger in Red Deer. By 1 a.m. I was walking through the frozen streets toward a 7-Eleven, surrounded by a dense nightlife of early twenty-somethings dressed for flirting. As if winter were a rumor. Edmonton holds these contradictions. A serious listening room with graffiti walls. Deep musical knowledge next to casual chaos. Cold air and warm people. Best show of the tour, in a way. Not because everything went perfectly. Because it didn’t, and still worked.