Page 37 - Jazz

JAN GARBAREK I n th e m iddl e of the w hite co-rrJaidnoGr arbarek

What is gained by being at a distance and what is lost by
coming closer? Ioachim tells me: Put your fingers on your face,
move them along your cheek, touch your lips, ruffle your hair.
Do this every day and whisper to yourself that you are your
own faithful friend, the only one who has stayed with you, the
one who knows you and will never desert you, never hurt you.
Which makes you put on a Jan Garbarek album and breathe
in, together with the long, spatial tones of the saxophone, the
joy of living through certain moments which you recognise and
remember from the magnificent festival at Gărâna and which
you will carry in your head forever. The friend who knows that
he must forget the cells where the charcoal drawings of the past
lie buried, forget even the meaning of the word solitude, because
anyway we were born alone and we are alone in our own selves
and so this cannot be a problem except (as some people say) for
those who are “unadapted and dependent”. This could tend to
lead to a kind of labelling....
These cells, the enemies who stir us to thought, and
thought is (on one view) the way to Hell. So are the furnaces of
Hell the natural destination of those who rake through the ashes
of the world and of the wild at heart and of those who are not
content with a “readymade” reality and of those who constantly
pile up new questions and of those who do not want to come to
the end of their questions and those who make questioning their
raison d’etre, like Garbarek the saxophonist with his questions
expressed in those long spatial tones that pass through the
drops of rain and are lost in the mist above the mountains that
make the Gărâna festival a place of “nowhere”, hot and frozen,
far away and so near? And the same goes for the restless Liviu
Butoi – that genius of a wind player – the hermit who, although
he knows the secrets of sound, went away in search of silence to
“the mountains whence the snow detaches itself as reluctantly/

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