Page 53 - Jazz

the crossroads, when I listened to I Wonder for an entire evening, the same track played over and over again as
I smoked and looked out of the window at the street and the passers-by and the lighted trams going by in the
darkness and the expanse of the park, more guessed at than seen through the mist because this was in the 1970s
and the world seemed to be a promise maintained in being by books of poetry, by sculpture using sheets of lead
and hazard control painting, by the Czech students who put their fingers on the point of Soviet bayonets, by the
power of rock super-groups and by the idols of the moment, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who
opened the padlock of a society that was efficient and drugged with technical progress and poured it into the
great pilgrimages to Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, by the world of the new man who had set even before he
had risen, a world shrouded in the smog of a century tormented by the ambitions of locomotive men, “the great
statesmen”.
Then I had the courage to enter this game of experimentation with my visions, somewhat overdramatised
and attacked in places by attacks of impressionability and oversensitivity, soft language and an easily-recognised
shyness that lose themselves in the quiet of night, with the purple mist dancing in the room and the tennis
players slowly floating through the air. And then all at once the sounds melt away and all sinks back into silence.
Apparently. Because what is left for us to hear are the occasional soft thumps and reverberations of tennis balls
hitting racquets. Hidden in the darkness of which McLaughlin’s Firebirds are flying towards the past.

53