Page 27 - Jazz

and matches the discreet lighting you find in locales deep in the basements of buildings, with their
thick supporting walls and vaulted ceilings, with the exposed brick of former times, with their
walls covered in sepia photographs and yellowed newspapers, with the low sound and rustling of
constant slow movement, with a minimal band which seconds intermezzos from the piano half-
obscured by the silver-blue tones of cigarette smoke and muffled voices.
Thus the essence of these locales whose time is almost over is a complex auditory

composition in which the sound of the music is soaked in the sound of a slice of life lived at a
slowed-down rhythm; what is produced is a kind of strange quintessence that is entirely different
from that in a concert hall or a private performance, a unique alchemy of sensations in an evening
that may be remembered as equally unique. And the poetry of this style of listening is on the
way to being lost as a result of the healthy way in which the efficient mind of contemporary man
wants to sanitise everything. What will a locale of this kind look like in the future without the

fine wreaths of cigarette smoke that flavour the air and visibility in the room?
What will a locale where jazz is played look like in a future concentrated in spaces composed
of cold materials –metal, glass fixings, bolts, moulded plastic furniture with harshly-coloured
metal frames, lines that are equally cold, rigid and impersonal and which seem to support
the idea of “simple well-aired spaces”, the economy of that same always-invoked modernity,

perpetuated in every formula employed in successive generations as a kind of alibi to cover
up any and every cultural adventure? Where will be the warm resonance of the walls, the
friendly feel of the massive wooden boards that we can rest our elbows on in leisurely fashion,
touch and beat time on with our fingers, the tones of ochre and sepia that emanate from the
very material essence of the room so richly decorated with old objects and memorabilia, older

and newer fetishes? What will become of the opportunities the eye has to rove around in an
everywhere of objects that compete to offer to the sight their infinitude of forms and uses, all
now wreathed in the olfactory mystery of time past?
And it may be that most jazz is talking about precisely this, the eternal story of
nostalgia for time past; the joy of escaping into a region of sound where improvisation (the
freedom to add a suitable tone depending on the artist’s instinct, his state and the inspiration

of the moment and pure spontaneity) is little more than the private expression of the quest
for the eternal mystery of time that will come: a soothing balm for the lack of peace of our
present.
But rather than continue along this train of thought that is filling me with melancholy,
I let it slip into the restless ocean that fills my being and listen to Gothic Jazz Dance from
David Benoit’s album Professional Dreamer. And this makes me get up from my armchair

and take a few steps around the room in a kind of waltz which imitates what I imagine
could be a prelude, for a long late November evening.

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