Page 79 - Jazz

threshold that leads to remaining Eternal...
Although for me Jazz has become a kind of therapy and a necessity, like the need to see my dog sleeping
peacefully under my desk or following me from room to room or even going a few steps in front of me and
constantly turning his head to make sure I am going in the direction he has anticipated, I have never really been
“hooked” by the Big Bands or the large-scale orchestral arrangements that were in fashion around the middle of
the last century. And I would not have been all that impressed by Davis’ concert at Montreux under the baton
of Quincy Jones if it hadn’t been, after all, Miles Davis, who was already there in my mind as a magnificent
character belonging to the world of lyrical, introspective jazz. And I would not have been all that impressed by
the large number of Grammy awards “for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and
Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group” that he received for almost all his albums if these had not been
recordings made together with a number of absolutely first-class instrumentalists such as the pianists Bill Evans,
Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Joe Zavinul, the saxophonists John Coltrane, George Coleman and Wayne
Shorter and that giant among guitarists John McLaughlin.

For most of us, the names listed here are just names with a foreign resonance. Yet each of them represents
a whole musical territory, a significant island in the archipelago of jazz, all places where we may be able to take
refuge when the pressure of “today” threatens to crush us with its obligations, its responsibilities, the rebuffing of
our wishes and aspirations, and the effect of the unforeseeable workings of the minds of “the others”.

It is very hard to choose just one Miles Davis album. Sometimes, when time has been more generous to
me, I have listened to live recordings of some of his concerts which had left my retinas imprinted with the image
of a wind player in shiny, richly-coloured clothes, his eyes protected by huge dark glasses, and have “seen” him
playing. With his hand on a pink trumpet over which bends a chiselled face carved in severe lines, animated by
the moments in which he forces air into the trumpet or shifts his wad of chewing gum around, pacing to and fro
in sympathy with John Coltrane in Green Dolphin Street – in concert in Stockholm, or in his famous Paris concert
in 1991, in the company of the “sacred monsters”, his face streaked with drops of sweat from his effort to reconcile
the strange life of an artist with the magic of sound, in order to then let the sounds settle at his feet like a carpet
over which he would walk, some months later, towards his place in the Time after time. Time after Time.

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