Page 73 - Jazz

October Interlude - Keith Jarrett 73

The sunny days are making a last stand in the golden leaves
on the trees opposite my window and the melancholy effect is
backed up by Autumn’s whole arsenal of muffled sounds and
the general slowing-down of nature. It’s the right time to start
attempting to redress the balance, and the clubs where they play
jazz seem to be the easiest and most pleasant way – there you can
find again that part of your personal time that was interrupted
and there you can find once more the old aromas of private time
in the old days, preserved in perfumes distilled from the discreet
clink of glasses, in the translucent haze of cigarette smoke and the
ambiguous hum of voices in a jazz-filled aquarium.
I remember a piece by Brad Mehldau that is in tune with
the state of the weather, hunt for it and listen to it again. It is called
Airport Sadness and I imagine it as the soundtrack for a film without
the tone of images as such, a film in which the characters slide
through space, through the glass corridors of airport terminals,
where they speak, walk or run, gesticulate, look inwards, slowly
pull their baggage trolleys along, talk on the phone, intersect,
appear and disappear into anonymity and seem to be coming and
going from all directions in a motion that is ambiguous but definite,
against a glass background on which can be seen large sections
of aircraft sliding slowly forwards and backwards in different
parallel planes, and then the sky and more distant regions where
you can see, rolling over dizzyingly and shooting into the blue, tiny
apparatuses that belong to an immensity of worlds of which we
know only a few shards.
And in order to remain under the spell of the same
instrument, I hit upon another pianist and begin with an album
recorded live at Tokyo ’96 by a royal combination: Keith Jarrett,
Gary Peacock and Jack Dejohnette. An album that emanates
the calm of great musicians who no longer need to display their
virtuosity and have no need of our competent observations or
sympathetic comments in order to maintain their position in
the ranking order. Yet any great musician is above our petty