In 2015, I was invited to play at the Montreal Jazz Festival as part of a special concert honouring the music of Miles Davis. I was fifty years old. I had been playing jazz seriously for seven years. The other musicians on stage that night included a pianist from New Orleans, a double bassist from São Paulo, and a trumpet player from Osaka who had been playing jazz since before I was born. I stood in the wings and thought: this could not have happened any other way. Every step — the shed, the tour bus, the Amsterdam silence — had led exactly here.

The spotlight finds you differently when you are fifty. At twenty, it feels like evidence — proof that you exist, that you matter. At fifty, it feels like information. It tells you where to stand. Nothing more. I stood in it and played, and the crowd in the arena — twelve thousand people — disappeared completely. There was only the music.

The standing ovation lasted four minutes. I know because the trumpet player timed it. He said, Jo, you should have come back to music sooner. I told him, I couldn’t have. If I had rushed back, the music might not have been ready. He looked at me for a moment and then nodded. Musicians understand timing.

The world tour that followed was nothing like the Redline tours. We had a conductor for the larger shows where we played with an orchestra. We had a headline act slot at three major festivals. We had a crew of eight. But there was no laminated schedule in anyone’s breast pocket, no sixteen-song setlist, no song that was always the encore. Every night, we chose what to play based on how the room felt. I would never have believed this was possible in 2001, when Pete was counting down departure times on the tour bus.

In Tokyo — the same city where that long-ago crowd had stood completely still and then erupted — I played a solo piece I had written in the spare room in Glasgow, working through the silence, bar by bar. It was called Sauchiehall Street, Tuesday Night. It was a tribute to the jazz club where everything had started again. The audience didn’t know the story behind it. They might not have understood it even if I had explained. But they heard it. That was enough.

There is a word in music — mastery — that people use too easily. Real mastery is not the absence of mistakes. It is the ability to use the mistakes. The six silent years were not a gap in my career. They were part of the work. The burnout, the withdrawal, the four bars in my friend’s basement — all of it. Milestones, not detours.

Curtis came to the London show. He sat in the front row with a large cup of tea and a smile that hadn’t changed since 1992. After the show, backstage, we had a reunion — him, me, Keys, and the two horn players from the original Redline lineup. We didn’t play anything. We just talked. At some point, Curtis said, if we had known back then what we know now, we might have made very different music. I thought about that for a long time.

He was right. And also completely wrong. We could have made different music. We might have been happier. We should have read the contract more carefully. All of that is true. But if we had known everything in advance — if the road had been clear and the mistakes had been removed — we would not have become the musicians we became. The legacy of a life in music is not the albums or the arenas. It is what happens to a person on the way there. The shed. The tour bus. The silence. The jazz club on a rainy Tuesday night. These are the things that matter.

I am still playing. I will play for as long as I can hold the sticks. And when I can’t, I will listen. There is always more to hear.