Page 87 - Jazz

and irrelevant when you listen to music, and sometimes all you need to do is to close your eyes
and keep imagining the scene in which the girl at the next table is chattering distractedly bathed
in diffuse honey-coloured light, gesticulating lazily and unravelling her translucent strands
of cigarette smoke into the air, while her fingers circle round the lip of her glass to awake a
strange, long-drawn-out sound that weaves its way through all the other sounds and wraps you
hypnotically in a profound fusion with your slight rocking on the chair and the movement of
your hand which, left to its own devices, from time to time quietly and gently taps out the rhythm
of Twilight Song or Waltz for Ruth from the Night and the City album, where another pianist of
contemplative jazz, Kenny Barron, has a memorable conversation with Charlie Haden.
And the magic of that same waltz played by Charlie Haden in the company of an extremely
sensitive guitarist, a native of the world of rock but thoroughly assimilated to jazz (Pat Metheny),
in another superb album, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Because it contains what you wanted to find
earlier, perhaps exactly that need to speak the word – saving point of support, but totally different,
terribly different, overpower by this “different” than how you have ever known it.
Now I know for certain that I am suffering from an incurable disease that can be blamed
on some alchemist’s potion for life that contains fine particles of melted metal; it floats in the
air around me when I listen to pieces like Always say goodbye, a subtle reconciliation of time past
and time present. And the only certainty I have in this time present is that I do not want to be
“exorcised” of its anarchic possessing spirits, because all is well with me and I have a kind of
peace and it is Wednesday, when I have chosen to do nothing but sit and look over the edge of the
day.

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