Laura Warrell in conversation about the allure of musicians and the power of jazz in her début, Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm

Laura Warrell’s sensual, gorgeously written début Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm tells of Boston-based jazz trumpeter Circus Palmer and the multiple women in his life. It opens with 40-year-old Circus, on tour in Miami, learning that his on-off lover Maggie, a fellow jazz musician, is pregnant. He is not best pleased: “I already got a kid barely talks to me”. This kid is 15-year-old Koko, on the verge of her own sexual awakening, who lives with her mother Pia, Circus’ ex-wife, who is still not over him. When he leaves Maggie and returns to Boston, Circus’ complicated love life will continue with a one-night stand with bar worker Peach, who is sweet on him; an unexpected encounter with his first love; and various other entanglements.

When Warrell speaks to me over the phone from her home in Los Angeles, bright and chipper despite the early hour, she explains that the novel grew out of a deeply unsatisfactory relationship she had with a musician back in 2013. “I felt he was slippery, he was non-committal and I recognised that I wasn’t the only woman in his life. I was curious about why I, and women like me, continue to be in relationships where we are not really getting what we want, yet we hang on.” In Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm she wanted “to tell the women’s stories and show what this relationship feels like [for them].”

It didn’t feel authentic or interesting to just present him as a sleazy womaniser, right?

As all the women who cross paths with Circus discover, he is not one to stick around. “It was the going he liked, the unclasping of links, liked getting to whatever was waiting on the other end of his leaving,” Warrell writes. Yet he is a character for whom your sympathies grow over the course of the novel, and Warrell is pleased to hear that. “It didn’t feel authentic or interesting to just present him as a sleazy womaniser, right? I thought [the reader] needed to know why he was so compelling to women.”

Darkness and mystery

It is Circus’ musical skill with a trumpet that lies at the heart of his attractiveness. Warrell writes extraordinarily well throughout about jazz music—both how it feels to play and how it feels to listen. “I’m not a musician and I’m not an expert on music,” she says, “but as a lover of music, I think jazz is the most literary because of its complexity.”

Jazz imbues the novel—the title is taken from a Jelly Roll Morton quote: “Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm”—and the very structure of the book mirrors a jam session, as Warrell explains: “There is a central melody in a jazz piece that is pulling the whole piece together. Each musician—the bassist, the trumpeter, the sax player, even the drummer—is stepping forward, taking a solo with their own interpretation of that melody or adding something new around it. Depending on their evening, their mood, who walks by in the club, it’s going to sound different.”

Music really helps me find the characters… I think that Circus is a traditionalist, so I was listening to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, [Charles] Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Lee Morgan’s ‘The Sidewinder’

In the novel, the women’s individual stories are the solos. “Circus is the through line, Circus is the melody and each woman is going to play. Each is going to interpret him differently, each of them has a different need.” Further on the concept of solos, each chapter is self-contained and works almost as an individual short story, although many of the characters reappear at a later point. “I didn’t want it to be a short story collection or even a novel in stories,” says Warrell, who rather wished the reader to feel that “this is a full, rich world of characters who are all moving forward together.” While writing, she created a Spotify playlist for everyone in the novel: “Music really helps me find the characters… I think that Circus is a traditionalist, so I was listening to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, [Charles] Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Lee Morgan’s ‘The Sidewinder’.”

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a novel about love and desire and the difficulty of true connection. It’s also about Koko’s coming-of-age and Circus’ mid-life crisis. Of all the stories in the novel, Koko’s emerges as the most touching. By turns bright and sparky or moody and truculent, and desperate to emulate the older girls at school, she misses the dad she barely knows, but there is hope of rapprochement for them both.