On Physiognomies, or the Anatomy of Ecstasy

Thousands of photographs.Wide stages. Close ups. From the distance the colours of the stage, golden obscurities, haloes of light from the spotlights the lightning-brief reflection of some rays .The characters on the stage. The way they move between the instruments, the positions in which they unite themselves with the instruments, every touch, the pauses between pieces, the sound of their expressions during the development and the sound of their physiognomies towards the climax and the sound of their physiognomies after a burst of applause. Montreal Jazz Fest 2006. Esbjorn Svensson Trio.
Then a section of jazz-rock fusion at Madrid. (Jazz Centro Cultural Villa) and a superb piano solo in the piece called Masquerade. A group of jazz giants – Pat Metheny (guitar), Michael Brecker (saxophone), Nils Landgren (vocals and trombone), Lars Danielsson (bass) and Wolfgang Haffner (percussion) – at Baltic Jazz, a new gallery of representations of faces from which emanate luminous rays, as they are looked at from different angles. Then Dan Berglund with his bass solo (Behind the Yashmak), concert in France at the Jazz at Jean-les-Pins festival. The movement of the head in a plane and the rhythm second. Esbjorn seated at the piano, on his feet and then seated again, hands mirrored, the reflection of his face in the polished black of the piano, close to the keyboard, almost lying on the keyboard with a unique movement of tenderness. Carcrash, filming angles, a niche in time in which Esbjorn Svensson, Dan Berglund and Magnus Ostrom can be seen, their shining in the memory. Sublime.
Then Genoa, 31.07.2007. The eruption of positive energies and the breaking-out of the wild spirit and its melting into a kind of suffering of ecstasy. I was speaking with Ioachim about that extroversion of creative spirits who always bring together and offer to others, with a kind of matchless joy, from their faces that are transfigured and as if tortured by the burning within their beings, by the incandescent heat at which the living substances of memory are combined, their awareness and understanding of our perishability, a presentiment of the final moment, sadness about but acceptance of the fact that we exist in a dimension of time that cannot be repeated.The joy of an existence sublimed/by the living-out of art. (From Gagarin’s Point of View and Dolores in a Shoestand – the final concert in Berlin). Sublime.
We were also talking about the intimacy that generates warmth and about the incandescence that is reached if one uses a sensor of this kind, and saying that probably the image of the person playing has the blinding light of molten gold. We spoke about the exchanges of energy in which sequentiality of events brings into the ritual in turn the presence of the stage through creativity and the presence of the audience through their reception of the music and their response to it. We spoke of the wave of creativity which, if it is received by the audience, returns to the performer in a richer form, is absorbed and then, as if in an alternative kind of process of photosynthesis, works within him and then emanates into the surrounding space an aura for everyone and an aura for each person.
Above the piano (Monterey Jazz Festival). Conversing with the piano in a solo as I remember Keith Jarrett does, and then the soundless shouting and the soundless words between the red streaks of the image filters that flood in the lines of the cheek, the tumult of arrhythmic rang of percussion, which have stayed in my memory as an area of fusion where I can meet the lyric of happenings that seem never to have happened, with the portion of life that is left to me and with the immensity of the red shadow that is forming slowly, slowly, more and more fluid and enticing, more and more definitive, deep and full of hiding places.
There (Dublin, 16.03.2007. Eight hundred streets by feet) can be found in infinity the piano-place where the fingers of Esbjorn Svensson continue to move in a cliche image. A dance in which the whole body balances itself above the keyboard, bending over slowly as if in a prayer ritual, as I have seen Brad Mahldau doing in a fantastic concert that makes him too part of this miraculous brotherhood of trios, there where one can make a study of faces worked from within into a mobility that expresses both suffering and ecstasy. Viaticum. Concert at the Blue Note. 2006. Sublime.
Different faces that cover, hide and display the same interior like living lava that changes its nuances, colours and shadows that are visible through the transparent skin. Because the face is a mask, partial, imperfect, through which we can glimpse the succession of inner states as in a film shown at random slowness or rapidity. A film in which you are the main character and have attained the apogee of fulfilment, the fulfilment of emotions and the ideal of the avid spectator who follows your actions in the final minutes of the screenplay, the character who gives up everything in that same moment of greatest fulfilment to go away, hunted, driven, hypnotised by the inertia of the search/searching.
Believe Beleft Below, the absolute waltz of a moment in which you are only with yourself, you are alone in the room, it is night, a half-shaded lamp in one corner bathes the room in a yellowish light, you are sitting in an armchair, you close your eyes and listen, and you have the sensation that you would like this moment experienced with an overwhelming feeling of blessedness never to end. And you would almost whisper, if you could do so to someone who had the power to make it happen, you would whisper a timorous wish that perhaps, when you opened your eyes, it would be possible for the moment to slide away, distancing itself down the ski slope of time, towards a new promise more illusory than all those up to now and at the same time more insistent in its call towards the unknown and more seductive. Waltz for the Lonely Ones (from the album When Everyone Has Gone). Sublime. And although the music carries on its way and flows, you want those few minutes to be repeated again and again, in a kind of time loop, a concentrated, inconsumable space.
And you realise that it is a Tuesday and that exactly now, by some marvellous coincidence, it is precisely Tuesday and you are in Wonderland. Moscow.30.05.2008. The last concert. In his sailor’s jersey Esbjorn Svensson introduces Dan Berglund and Magnus Ostrom. Farewell within the spirit There we can be together and we are together. And we will no longer have a reason to open our eyes at this moment, because our eyes are open already, inside, towards Wonderland. And as soon as we have been able to see it, it will belong to us. Just as we will belong to it, in the end, for ever.