Page 41 - Jazz

The passage between words - Oregon

Fed up with the lounging-around of a Sunday, I made a solemn resolve to go for a spin around the area
in the car, whatever the weather, to listen to Oregon (they sound incredible in the car) and to drive along minor
roads, slowly, regarding the countryside as a secondary element of this kind of private film, a visual track which
would give a complex intensity to the music, the fusion of the anonymous life of this happening, unrolled over
the surface of a random time.
I listened to Oregon again and remembered them in concert in Timisoara, in a hall with top class acoustics
(according to musicians who regularly played there), and then I remembered what they were like at the The Note
club: talking unpretentiously with some of us, scribbling down notes on paper napkins, calmly sipping their
drinks, concentrating and interested in the conversation. Not a trace of the arrogance or “celebrity style” you see
in stars and especially in petty “great men”, the parvenus of the business world, the female “beautiful people”
that people buzz around, or in the condescension of marsupial political animals.
Impressions from then, sequences combining in a whirl of overlapping cliches, the piano’s pure commentary, its
light repetitions, the air that holds them and then the acoustic guitar and the thick touches of the bass and the
long-drawn-out interventions of the wind player and the dancing of hands over the surface of the percussion
instruments that maintain a rhythm somehow discreetly and then abandon it for a new portion of air to which,
like a freely swinging light, comes the sound of the oboe. Silence of a candle – a classic work.
When I recall my times of greatest sensitivity and arrange them in order of intensity, that Oregon concert stands
out as the most profound performance experience of my life to date.

COLIN WALCOTT

GLENN MOORE

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