Page 85 - Jazz

a small crack in the obsessive trap known as “living in the present”
and even brings me a measure of detachment from what I ought to be
concentrating on right now: effectiveness within my social timeframe,
my “important and useful” role, my engagement diary with its priority
lists and its countless tick boxes against things I haven’t done yet but
need to do, things waiting their turn to exert their devouring pressure on
me.
In other words, a way of appealing to the things that I ought to
regard as vital, to the “firm” gestures of political clans and the insinuating
verbal modulations of television presenters, the civic responsibility associated
with elections, the vehemence of promises and the gallery of current public
personalities, ephemeral little mandarins and big businessmen weighed down
by their dramatic destiny, an irreplaceable world……Twaddle. Pointless...
And I need to defend myself and so I listen to the track Silence from the
album of the same name (Billy Higgins, Chet Baker and Enrico Pieranunzi) and
think of several tiny snowflakes sticking to each other and then to another one
and yet another one until they achieve the consistency of a fragile snowball rolling
down in a weak imitation of an avalanche. Seeking, in fact, an increase of warmth,
the solidarity that we constantly talk about and which springs from a perception and
understanding of the existence of the other as a path to our own existence.
And in order not to become a prey to melancholy I listen to My Funny Valentine, which
brings a wave of sunshine, and then Round midnight, classic pieces which float, return
and embody themselves chameleon-like in big concerts, as if to rediscover a red thread
of Jazz running through the tentatives and escapes, through the impressions left by the
personalities of instrumentalists of genius, which haunt us like wandering angels, like
missionaries preaching faith in the healing virtues of sound.
This sounds archaic and oversensitive, Ioachim tells me, this is what happens when
you have too much time to spend on your own and when you suddenly feel that you’ve been
saying something too much anyway and it’s time you stopped, made a break and rounded it
off with a “value” judgment. But you can never find the right word to close with and you cannot
put your hand on any other intelligent replacement for it, as a kind of supporting point to look for
with apparent ostentation . Something about which you can say to yourself that if only you could
find it things would be far simpler, as otherwise you have to pay for all the other possible solutions,
all contaminated by their belonging to the everyday, solutions that demand a price that may even be
as high as life itself.
But there is no point in going that far. Anyway, any “value judgment” is entirely external

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