After her wedding service in 2003, Mandy Sayer stopped traffic. Or at least the musicians leading her and her new husband, Louis Nowra, through the streets of Kings Cross did. “Saxophones wailing, tambourines jingling, drums booming, even managing to pick up one or two rough sleepers along the way,” she writes in her latest memoir, No Dancing In The Lift.
Three years earlier, in 2000, the same scenario had played out at the funeral of her jazz musician father, Gerry. The congregation followed the hearse down Darlinghurst Road, “all playing percussion instruments to the saxophonist’s fast blues,” she tells Guardian Australia.
