A couple of years before I left school some of my class mates started bringing jazz records they’d purchased in specialist music shops in London. It was my introduction to a style of music that came to be known as Modern Jazz. A development from swing, this free flowing form of music was pioneered by various instrumentalists who had cut their musical teeth with one or more of the Basie, Ellington and Goodman bands of the 1940s.

Zoot Sims and his brother Ray were members of the Benny Goodman band in 1946-7, Zoot on saxophone and Ray on trombone. Afterwards Zoot joined the Woody Herman band. There he worked alongside Stan Getz and Al Cohn, establishing his reputation for an intensely melodic style of playing influenced by, and building upon, Lester Young’s laid back vocabulary. It was his work with the Gerry Mulligan sextet that I remember most fondly from that time.

I used my love of jazz in my novel Transgression. A young woman arrives in London in 1947 where, through her friendship with a medical student, she discovers live jazz in a Soho club.

The main thing, so far as Mabel was concerned, was that he appeared knowledgeable about jazz. He could talk for hours about the difference between Basie and Ellington, knew all the new combos, could explain why Monk was so much cooler than Moreton, compared Mulligan’s swinging baritone with Sims’s tenor playing, said he was looking forward to hearing the result of the latter’s partnership with Getz and Cohn now he’d left Benny Goodman and joined Woody Herman’s new line-up.

Of course, the time would come when she realised some of this was complete tosh, made up to impress her. For now, she was grateful for the opportunity to see and hear musicians performing in the flesh.

The atmosphere inside the club was all she had expected, and more. They were able to sit close to the small platform on which the musicians played. She could see the tendons in their necks straining, their cheeks puffed out as they blew into the mouthpieces of their instruments, their fingers flying across the valves that changed the timbre of the notes they played. Sweat poured from their hair lines, dripped from their chins, and light flashed brassily from the curved surfaces of trumpets and saxophones.

And that is my final contribution to the 2016 atoz challenge. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all 26 as much a I’ve enjoyed writing them.