Buena Vista social jazz

In the late sixties and early seventies I did not know the meaning of jazz. I was a non-conformist, rebellious, long-haired lad who used to go to the clubs where Timisoara groups played and the few discotheques that existed and listen to pop, blues and progressive. Then my friendship with the other music lovers unexpectedly brought me the role of disk jockey, that is, a kind of “person who puts the music on” in weekend clubs. I began with a few dozen records from my friend Sandu G’s collection which I played on the record players in the club on the top floor of the University of Medicine hall of residence, where the faculty chapel had been in the past.

As I listened and listened again I went through all the stages of evolution from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, from supergroups like Cream and Jimi Hendrix & Co., from soul and then blues, to experimental groups like Vanilla Fudge, Soft Machine, Mothers of Invention etc. etc.

I listened with unquenchable thirst to any radio station that broadcast the music of the day. Radio Free Europe at 5 pm and then, late at night, repeats of Cornel Chiriac’s show and then Radio Luxembourg. But those closest to me both literally and figuratively were “the Serbs” with their radio and television stations in Novi Sad who which broadcast almost all the major festivals, festivals which thus echoed behind the Iron Curtain. We were living in the middle of the Pop era, with everything that meant, in the wake of the Flower Power years. We were happy to wear jeans and flowery shirts with our long hair and beards and proud if we could escape when raided by the militia who waged war against our fetishes of style and dress. Music was the pigment, the personifying organic substance that caused Timisoara to be regarded as the most avant-garde city in Romania (“the Wild West of Romania”), inhabited by a cosmopolitan public seated at the windows of the country that faced towards Yugoslavia (for which the people of Timisoara felt great admiration), Hungary and (for those with German ethnic family connections) Germany and Austria, a public who wore their claim to be different with a certain ostentation in a world of imposed uniformity that was both docile and tortured by its forced exile, a real neurosis of mediocrity. Music brought with it an idealised image of the West, the mirage of free countries that inhabited the aspirations of all young people. This “beyond the window” had become an obsession that formed the foundation for the exodus of a whole generation. “Escape/Flight” to the West was the subject of lengthy, tenacious study and was often paid for with the would-be escapee’s life.

Because the free world that could be glimpsed between the window bars had the appearance of a fairyland and the desire to get to know it directly and to be part of it was more powerful than the whistle of the frontier guards’ bullets, more powerful than the specter of death by drowning if one swam across the Danube in summer or winter, more powerful than the prospect of suffocating in a sealed container on a train or, in less dramatic cases, the savage beating one would receive from border guards and Securitate men and then the years in prison among thieves and murderers, stigmatized as a person who had tried to cross the border, a pariah in the society of the “ new man”.

And this whole epic about the dream of living in freedom was wreathed in music, and we made our way through that era wreathed in music, with the celebrated reprobates of that time - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison - as our standard-bearers and with the image of the great festivals at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight imprinted on our minds.

We were spiritually close to music-lovers everywhere, in a brotherhood which, perhaps, we shall never experience again...

Jazz insinuated itself little by little, penetrated indistinctly and enticingly, opening up proteically to occupy the entire stage, one night when I was listening to Radio Paris just before dropping off and suddenly came upon a concert by a group who did not belong to the area I was familiar with. I remember that all feeling of sleepiness left me and that I was purely and simply amazed by what I was hearing for the first time in a totally different emotional register, the long-drawn-out sounds produced by the wind players and the richness of the orchestral arrangement, the subtleties and stupefying energy of this way of making music. It was a jazz concert.

I had taken my first real dose and was already addicted. This dependence was accentuated by a crisis provoked by the onset of a commercial period characterised by the proliferation of mediocre, superficial disco music from groups like Middle of the Road and Boney M, a period which helped me to grasp that my time as an “animator” had reached its natural end since the majority of those who came to the club were not coming there to listen to music but to dance and to meet each other in a way that was perfectly simple, natural and devoid of any idealism that was based on my criteria of value. I came to understand that each one of us had their own choices to make and that it was time to leave behind the disco DJ’s stand at the Students’ Centre, the “Lyre” Club and sometimes the T Club and to step down on to the floor to experience a time as a simple devotee of music, one, however, who followed his preferences and accordingly frequented one club or another.

There then followed my experience at the Central (a hotel that had a restaurant on the top floor, the only one where jazz was played), and this came with a new world of friendship and there I was, a regular (once a week) coming in to have a glass of wine and listen to Banica Bratu’s group. Because what was played here was definitely Jazz, with a condescending nod towards my immature rock generation...

Here one could find and step on to the pontoon bridge which spanned the distance from the inter-war period over the years of the Communist era and over the “golden years” of Pop to ambient Jazz, rare and somehow limited, compressed into the commercial premises where it was played. But it was still good quality jazz.

It was here that I first heard someone other than Janis Joplin play Summertime, although I will never abandon the version by that angelic-reprobate soloist either. Because, even if jazz has come to be for me a way of feeling a particular way, what progressive rock, blues and pieces from the other musical genres that have awoken vibrations in me have done cannot be cancelled out and one cannot start constructing ridiculous hierarchies, since each of the genres represents a colour in the rainbow that arches over my life whenever I have the power to step out of the course of time and look within.

And for me it could be said that “everything comes from music”, but not only from music but from the atemporal space that I have discovered and that allows me to enter into it for a few moments. Together with the immaterial substance of the word, with the sound of colour, with the radiation of form, with the alchemical reality of sound, there where all the sparks of light from us congregate – our portion of the divine which once discovered has the healing power to display the world differently from in its transitory daily ritual that is imbued by suffering and illusions. To display the world in the form of a moment extended/stretching towards the boundless, in which you can whisper in beatitude, blessedness and joy that you rejoice that you are alive and that you can listen like this and that thus listening you are alive, you live indeed.