Page 91 - Jazz

On the archipelago as a microcosm of the sensible world johnny răducanu

I remember how I felt that first time when I received jazz as a kind of 91
communion, in ’73-’74, as I listened to Paul Weiner in a basement in Piaţa
Maria, in the period when long hair and military parkas and Che Guevara
badges were all the rage and when I was trying to be part of a sort of latter-day
‘peace army’ which, paradoxically, represented the avant garde of Romanian
society at that time, in a city that was reckoned to be the Wild West of Romania,
the place where ‘great’ groups played pop music and witnessed the first mass
movements as people headed for concert halls and for the Stadium, which on
these occasions was guarded by cordons of militia.
There, in the amniotic fluid in which there bubbled the seeds of the
coming revolution, seethed a rebellious world hidden under the layers of
makeup that characterised the period of the ‘new man’, makeup influenced
by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a worn-down Communism, a
Communism of the periphery overlaid upon a Balkan world that did not even
understand itself, piloted in a derivative fashion by insignificant people, and
all this within a sea of hypocrisy in which generation after sacrificed generation
drowned in turn.
In this grey, hallucinatory world there nevertheless came into existence
a fragile archipelago in which one could live differently, even if only for a
few moments, where literature, music and art could be prized as a kind of
spice for a number of tolerated addicts who were too ‘sick’ to be treated with
the ideological medication of the period and completely beyond reclaiming
for the healthy society of the new man, that society which offered sacrifice
to itself in fake zeal for the good of a country whose uneasy slumbers were
constantly haunted by the will of the wisp of emigration. A mother-fatherland
that one lived with in a step-relationship, in a vicious circle of hunger,
hatred, denunciations, cold and disgust, of fury suffocated in inertia, of self-
abandonment to the self-inoculation of belief in a twisted destiny. In this world,
where small truths and illuminations could take place only as islands, people
played quality jazz in a stubborn determination to resist the omnipresence
of cosmeticised folklore, to make their way between the “cranes, mariners,
sunsets” and obvious sentiments of light music, in tacit competition with the
music of the wideappeal groups who amalgamated and distilled the open
expression of non-submission with the image of the well-behaved rebel taking