Page 61 - Jazz

I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder – he has a cheap cabin in the
country, like Monroe, N.Y, the chicken] farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper - lentil soup, vegetables, bread&butter – mitlz –
he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.
I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there. What’s the matter? Why don’t you
put a stop to it?
I try, he said – That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil
soup.”
The Mystical Adventures Suite. But the same thing also happens in the Cosmic Messenger album
with its vaguely “blue” coloratura, especially in Ethereal Mood and in I only feel good with you, a piece in
a sensitive register that perfectly captures the state of simultaneous fulfillment and uncertainty that is
conveyed by the idea of the wellbeing of closeness, an ideal expressed through fullness of sound and
meditative inflexions but also through a presentiment of uncertainty, as is clearly the case in the track
that gives its name to the album – possibly one of the most beautiful of jazz “ballads”. It is the same
with Cosmic Messenger from the album of that name, a piece that expresses nostalgia for the Mahavishnu
Orchestra, a piece characterised by recollection but also by the replacing of an experience into an
exploration of the present moment, a tribute to his belonging, more or less intuitively, to the incredibly
complex state created by John McLaughlin and of the wizardry with which McLaughlin unified the
contributions of a whole gallery of musicians who later spun off from that alchemical planet to become
masters and unifiers in their own right.

The feel of Cosmic Messenger can also (I think) be found in Imaginary Voyage, an album of
reverberations and processed sound, bursting with atmosphere but lacking the complexity and depth
of Inner Mounting Flame. These can be found here and there in Part IV, but to a rhythm that is slightly
alien, tending towards rock. That experience of the corrupting extravagant style of Frank Zappa (a restless,
technique-dominated and hyperproteic burlesque) could not fail to leave its mark. Nothing wrong in that,
only that it makes it different. But in Mirage from the Enigmatic Ocean album, with its repeated and layered
rhythms forming a background for the meandering commentary of the electric violin, clearly narrative,
crafting “with profound elegance” the melodic lines of an exceptional musical construction, I find it easier
to be reconciled even to a slide towards this different. Apart from this, the most complex demonstration
of what J.L.P.means is the French anthology “Le Voyage”, where you can find the two doses of the now
moment which I value without any fear of becoming addicted. Because I am addicted anyway. Just as I
am addicted to looking out of the window, which belongs to the now moment, just as I am addicted to the
sublime restlessness of the now moment and to those who manipulate my affections and to the ingredients
of illusion and to the strand of air knotted between the moment just past and the one which seems to be
coming, to nostalgia for what seems to be Once a blue planet. To the moment when my voyage will come to
rest In the kingdom of peace.

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