Page 39 - Jazz

As moss from its familiar tree” (to steal a glance at Dead Poets Society). And then I know that I need to listen to
Cloud of Unknowing, a track on the In Praise of Dreams album (shortlisted for a Grammy award in 2005, with Kim
Kashkashian on the viola and Manu Katche on drums), where there seem to exist some attempts at an answer,
since the piece is preceded by a “node of place and time”, the same cloud of dreaming and the same infinitude
of questions... The same is true of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, where the thought-wish is sublimated into
reality, a kind of reality which brings into existence what we have always wanted more than anything and which
bears the image of what has disappeared, since what we have valued more than anything always disappears at a
certain moment as if it had existed in our imagination only for a second. And then the perplexity of questioning
and distance. Which may lead to The Tall Tear Trees from the Twelve Months (a classic album).
The first time I listened to Garbarek with closer attention was when I was compiling the music for the
street performance “Romania – Post Scriptum” and then I reflected on the sense of distance and closeness and
on the fact that in whichever direction I turn to evaluate my present position, I find myself only through the
supposed medium of an infinite white corridor through which from time to time, flapping in their soft black flight,
pass swallows. There were Swallows.
Today has been a Sunday worthy of the name. Quiet conversations about Officium, and about One goes
there alone which reminds me of Oregon and about Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows and a Red
Roof where among the translucent clichés, coloured and methodically arranged, can be glimpsed the bass player,
Eberhard Weber, and the drummer Jon Christensen, a little drama and the vision of cherry boughs which float
around us in a booming of verdigris-covered bronze. Little by little we became characters who might have landed
from the planet called the Net, where everything is possible and “the mature world outside” is imitated.
There from where closeness burns and destroys and leaves ash in the hidden corners of the eyes and where
its brief flame yet gives warmth and plays in the white depths of the walls, it makes us smile and long to go out
open-eyed into the space where we may perhaps meet (to the extent to which it is granted to us) cherry trees in
blossom and then their fruit-laden boughs, and a splash of red juice will drop from our lips on to our chin and
someone will notice it with a smile and gently wipe it away. Will it be like that?
What a dilemma we have been given to live in…

39