Page 49 - Jazz

From Blue Alert to the Mahavishnu Orchestra

When you receive a reply to a message you had given up hope of ever reading a reply to, it’s like managing
to hit a ball as the tennis players at the end of the film Blow Up do, stretching up and moving in the rhythm of
a slow waltz, screwing themselves up for the effort, gliding and floating through the air. What a crazy film! A
film that conjures up, relentlessly and unforgettably, the image of players as I drive along the banks of the Bega
late in the evening when it’s quiet and hear, against the background of the steady hum of the engine, that deep
thud of racquet on ball which weaves its way through the music of Anjani Thomas’s album Blue Alert. Stretching
the boundaries of jazz, but in the spirit and image of an orchestra playing in a bandstand bathed in pale golden
light beside the river on a summer night for a single lingering couple who dance on and on, unaware that the
people have melted away into the darkness of the town. It may sound like a story, but the story of Michelangelo
Antonioni can be equally a substitute for reality and Lord, how I would have loved to have been there, pressing
my forehead against the cold mesh of the wire fence, listening to the widely-spaced, significant blows of racquet
against ball in the half-light of the floodlights that cast the occasional beam towards where I am so that I can see
myself as a character and the hero of some ‘blue’ screenplay. There are times when I would have no hesitation
in entering that same fictional space where I can find Ray Bradbury’s island, in walking over the fine sand of the
beach lapped (gently again) by tiny seaweed-bearing waves. Without taking any notice of the warning sign which
says in capital letters “Look out, there are tigers here!”. Where the director uses pieces/tunes/works by Airto
Moreira – Flora’s Song or San Francisco River – or Oregon on/for/as the soundtrack.

At one point I was telling a woman friend about the strange mental states I experience when scenes from
certain films pass through my mind and the equally strange and “different” experiences I have when I watch a
theatre play. I was reminding her that I had just seen Edward (at the National Theatre) and was still stirred by the
complex way in which it had been conceived. I wrote to her: “Do try to see it. It’s overwhelming. The directing
and the screenplay fitted together to perfection and the play reached its climax in Act Two with statuary cut-outs
against a background of the kind of music that makes you feel more deeply”. My use of superlatives shows that I
was “caught” in the same net as the musician friend who has in him the essential light of this kind of “seen” and
who also leaves his footprints on Bradbury’s salt-and-seaweed-smelling beach (Ilie Stepan).
But we need to change the record in order not to end up having a whole evening of blue sounding-out, and
after Hot Sand by Airto Moreira again, a little parody from Brand X, fusions with a more virile tempo but just
as inclined toward narrative, and a final stop at John McLaughlin’s fantastic Between Nothingness and Eternity,
followed by the fantastic Lost Trident Sessions and by almost everything achieved by a man who ranks as one of
the musical geniuses of the last century despite being little known to the wider public, a public which from this
point of view is exactly where McLaughlin says: between Nothingness and Eternity. That is to say, it has lost a
kind of “everything” and has lost nothing. But I know that I would be different, perhaps very different, if I had
not listened to the message of the Mahavishnu Orchestra at an age at which although you do not have the ability
to comprehend so deeply or an understanding of the complexity of things you do have the ability to let yourself

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