Page 59 - Jazz

But all the same, today has an extra chance of remaining present, as it is, polluted by presentiments and
fragments of the puzzle that is tomorrow, when the thought comes to me to listen to a musician who had the
truly enviable experience of playing alongside the great masters of jazz of the twentieth century: Jean Luc Ponty.
Choosing to end his career as a violinist (jazz experts call him a pioneer of the electric violin) but bringing to this
all he had learned from playing the piano, the clarinet and the sax, Ponty found his place at the interface between
genres, from all of which he drew nuances, modalities, techniques and themes in the recuperative and unifying
spirit of fusion.
J.L.P. is characterised by a rich, vigorous style with flowing melodic lines – a style temperamentally
supported by the fellow members of his group – though he frequently leaves room for pieces of a more meditative
hue, interior commentaries and dialogues with extended, drawn-out sounds which identify themselves and give,
with a wide range of suggestivity, their names to the tracks.
To conform (with some difficulty) to a dry, technical style of presentation, I may say of J.L.P. that he is a
graduate of the Paris Conservatoire and that he and Stéphane Grappelli have equal claims to be regarded as the
most distinguished and most influential of European jazz violinists. I mention this point for the benefit of those
who view jazz from the exalted heights of black suits, starched shirts and bow ties and who are unable to step
out of the mould of a classical manner of perceiving things that is conservative , in its pretensions and in its habit
of bon-ton mimicry. Because the profound depth that has been reached by much jazz music and particularly by
European jazz deserves to be taken very seriously, especially perhaps by the consumers of operetta, which, as a
frothy, facile, playful and optimistic spectacle, embodies the easily digestible story of the still marginal musical
experience of “real” music. But I am talking about an otherwise and I know that it is all to the good that our world
is enriched by the existence of such otherwises, intermediaries . The correlation between the technical aspect of art
and the condition of perplexity, between what can happen and what has already happened, is always mediated
by someone outside ourselves.

Let us use the name of Mediators for those from among whom we can choose someone who can with a
gesture stop time and take us through this breach between the previous moment and the one that is about to
come and place us in a loop outside time, somewhere to where man’s biological existence cannot penetrate and
where absolute happiness is probably possible, and where the health of our mind is probably possible and where
probably it is possible that once you go in, something of our individual existence remains for ever, and where
probably the Great Encounter between all of us is possible, where what is natural is certainly possible. And where
God is certainly possible, maybe even as Naomi Ginsberg, the mother of the notorious poet, met him: “Yesterday

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