Page 75 - Jazz

pretensions to assign him a place in a system of categories and hierarchies; he slips through our
filters, clogged up as they are by the sediment left by lengthy, laboured reasoning that instead of
bringing us closer creates a distance between us as between a psychiatrist and his patient. And
perhaps this is exactly how we may miss the second in which we could catch Last night when we were
young. Lord, what a lot that song title says…and how timeless that second can be! And how this
composition connects with the famous atemporal My funny Valentine and the wonderful Never let me
go.
I Thought About You and Late Lament from Still Live also belong to this “blue” chromatic, and
so does Over the Rainbow from the Scala concert; all show the same sequence-creating technique, with
resonances of Handel. And then another piece that is monumental in its dimensions, elaboration,
structural diversity and message is For Miles (Davis) from the Bye Bye Blackbird album.
But Keith Jarrett is a pianist who ranges over a broad temperamental spectrum, from brisk
rhythms overflowing with energy to a multiculturally-influenced exoticism to solo passages moaned
vocally in a kind of personal trance of profound transfiguration.
And now my mind is echoing with My Song as played by Jan Garbarek at the Gărâna Festival, a
piece that can be found on Jarrett’s album of the same name, an album produced by a quartet
dominated by this inspired, complex and fascinating pair. And again that old, irresistible bad habit
of listening to an atmospheric album, calm and meditative, in the spirit of pub jazz, unsophisticated
and possibly even a little “commercial”, which passes beyond music in the direction of an
ambiguously sentimental region that has a slightly abandoned element in it, with sepia photographs,
golden nuances and soft-focus mercury luminescence, with one’s thoughts left at the mercy of the
eternal story whose essence is captured in Round Midnight from the Whisper Not album.
But why am I, Petru, taking the time to write about all this, and with what purpose? In the
end, as I am not keeping all this feeling, in its lava-like, chaotically nuanced, haphazard, turbid,
threaded and discontinuous form to myself, it could be said that I am writing for somebody. A
multiple and anonymous somebody, and I often wonder how much use what I write is to him, and
at the same time I wonder if the fact that I am writing is actually only a strictly literary-confessional
exercise and “the other” no more than a pretext.

Is that it? And in order not to fall into the trap of my own opening up and thus to transform
myself imperceptibly, as I have said before, into Gregory, the insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, into
whose soft vulnerable carapace even apples thrown by those near him stick – those who used to be
his friends – I will say that I write only from these noble, disinterested literary motives. But in fact I
am trying to deceive. Yet I will accept responsibility for this confession. And metamorphosis into All
My Tomorrows…

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