Page 25 - Jazz

AVISHAI COHEN On classical feeling and modern framing

The temptation to constantly look out of the window. However
I sit, I try to have within eye’s reach fragments of trees and buildings
over which there passes lighting of different intensities from that inner
camera which takes pictures even in the absence of any intention

to look, stores them, takes them out again and reprojects them,
sometimes, when I am not expecting it to, in the atmosphere of a
given moment and a particular place that are far from the present.
I am listening to an impressive piece that reminds me of
the much-lamented Esbjörn Svensson, a track from an album by

a young American trumpeter, Christian Scott: Litany against fear.
Strangely close this backing to the piano accompaniment, you
would say it was the same hand continuing (in the vast perspective
of life) to take part in the great performance, spanning with sound
the distance between continents and modelling itself on the

blowing of the trumpet. And although I am sitting here in the
depths of late autumn, a mysterious metamorphosis all at once
changes the scene into one of spring. And so it is spring again
and rain is falling. I opened the window and entered the smell

of rain freshly fallen on just-sprouted vegetation and on dusty
earth and on the summer-houses of dry wood in the garden and
on the low hum of the city, since I frequently think of the low
hum of the city as a background sound from which I cannot
escape and from which, in any case, I would probably not even

be happy to escape. And against the background of Charles
Lloyd’s Hymn to the Mother, which settles itself out little
by little as the disjointed notes fall, my restless and image-
creating thoughts jump from place to place, grouping and

regrouping, pushing each other away, trying to disentangle
and organise themselves, as if each of them had a separate
and totally anarchic life.
And so it strikes me that the world of jazz of an ambient,
blue, melodic character is populated especially by women’s

voices whose coloratura is well suited to atmospheric jazz

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