From Blue Alert to the Mahavishnu Orchestra

When you receive a reply to a message you had given up hope of ever reading a reply to, it’s like managing to hit a ball as the tennis players at the end of the film Blow Up do, stretching up and moving in the rhythm of a slow waltz, screwing themselves up for the effort, gliding and floating through the air. What a crazy film! A film that conjures up, relentlessly and unforgettably, the image of players driving along the banks of the Bega late in the evening when it’s quiet and hearing, against the background of the steady hum of the engine, that deep thud of racquet on ball which weaves its way through the music of Anjani Thomas’s album Blue Alert. Stretching the boundaries of jazz, but in the spirit and image of an orchestra playing in a bandstand bathed in pale golden light beside the river on a summer night for a single lingering couple who dance on and on, unaware that the people have melted away into the darkness of the town. It may sound like a story, but the story of Michelangelo Antonioni can be equally a substitute for reality and Lord, how I would have loved to have been there, pressing my forehead against the cold mesh of the wire fence, listening to the widely-spaced, significant blows of racquet against ball in the half-light of the floodlights that cast the occasional beam towards where I am so that I can see myself as a character and the hero of some ‘blue’ screenplay? There are times when I would have no hesitation in entering that same fictional space where I can find Ray Bradbury’s island, in walking over the fine sand of the beach lapped (gently again) by tiny seaweed-bearing waves. Without taking any notice of the warning sign which says in capital letters “Look out, there are tigers here!”. Where the director uses pieces/tunes/works by Airto Moreira – Flora’s Song or San Francisco River – or Oregon on/for/as the soundtrack.

At one point I was telling a woman friend about the strange mental states I experience when scenes from certain films pass through my mind and the equally strange and “different” experiences I have when I watch a theatre play. I was reminding her that I had just seen Edward (at the National Theatre) and was still stirred by the complex way in which it had been conceived. I wrote to her: “Do try to see it. It’s overwhelming. The directing and the screenplay fitted together to perfection and the play reached its climax in Act Two with statuary cut-outs against a background of the kind of music that makes you feel more deeply”. My use of superlatives shows that I was “caught” in the same net as the musician friend who has in him the essential light of this kind of “seen” and who also leaves his footprints on Bradbury’s salt-and-seaweed-smelling beach (Ilie Stepan).

But we need to change the record in order not to end up having a whole evening of blue sounding-out, and after Hot Sand by Airto Moreira again, a little parody from Brand X, fusions with a more virile tempo but just as inclined toward narrative, and a final stop at John McLaughlin’s fantastic Between Nothingness and Eternity, followed by the fantastic Lost Trident Sessions and by almost everything achieved by a man who ranks as one of the musical geniuses of the last century despite being little known to the wider public, a public which from this point of view is exactly where McLaughlin says: between Nothingness and Eternity. That is to say, it has lost a kind of “everything” and has lost nothing. But I know that I would be different, perhaps very different, if I had not listened to the message of the Mahavishnu Orchestra at an age at which although you do not have the ability to comprehend so deeply or an understanding of the complexity of things you do have the ability to let yourself be fascinated and to seek faith as an absolute of the search.

Just at the moment when the world of the clear-minded ones and those chosen to direct the destiny of us all is speaking with pathos about holy matters, about “patriotism”, about the defence of our national heritage, about the understanding and absolute legitimacy of those who give verdicts, about the glory belonging to those who sacrifice their lives for the ideas of others or about the honour of losing your life in the name of banal or sophisticated symbols, about the exalted profession of those who mediate between God and ordinary mortals, about the American dream and the Soviet dream, about the unseen discretionary power of bank deposits, about the purifying pretentiousness of black suits and the beatific gilding of financial elites, about the dream destiny of beautiful girls, yachts, cruises and skyscrapers, about extraterrestrial palaces and about the world that belongs to great men who are so far beyond our understanding and themselves so mortal. What injustice! When their whole life is before them and there comes a moment when they have to lose it and together with it all the greatness, glory and countless zeros of an idol which they worshipped and to which they were willing to sacrifice everything.

But I know that I would be different, perhaps very different, if I had not listened to You Know You Know from the album The Inner Mounting Flame and so understood that I belong to a generation born at the crossroads of ideologies, a generation whose eyes are turned inwards on the sunset of the years of innocence when smiling young people scattered flowers on the barrels of weapons and sought in the creative force of Nature an alternative to the force of progress as they tried to discover, in the deep recesses of meditation, the place where the Spirits had gone into exile so that they could encounter them and from them draw out answers. But I know that I would be different, perhaps very different, if I had not listened to Dream from the Between Nothingness and Eternity album or Wings of Karma from the Apocalypse album. I would not have understood that even the innocence of my generation was largely illusory, that a venomous seed had gnawed into us and what we want does not seem to be what we want, that we are pottering around the house for a world in which we will not be happy and in which we are not happy and do not understand what it is we are really longing for.

And I felt that all this was somehow made plain to me by what the magic of John McLaughlin brought together right then during my years at the crossroads, when I listened to I Wonder for an entire evening, the same track played over and over again as I smoked and looked out of the window at the street and the passers-by and the lighted trams going by in the darkness and the expanse of the park, more guessed at than seen through the mist because this was in the 1970s and the world seemed to be a promise maintained in being by books of poetry, by sculpture using sheets of lead and hazard control painting, by the Czech students who put their fingers on the point of Soviet bayonets, by the power of rock super-groups and by the idols of the moment, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who opened the padlock of a society that was efficient and drugged with technical progress and poured it into the great pilgrimages to Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, by the world of the new man who had set even before he had risen, a world shrouded in the smog of a century tormented by the ambitions of locomotive men, “the great statesmen”.

Then I had the courage to enter this game of experimentation with my visions, somewhat overdramatised and attacked in places by attacks of impressionability and oversensitivity, soft language and an easily-recognised shyness that lose themselves in the quiet of night, with the purple mist dancing in the room and the tennis players slowly floating through the air. And then all at once the sounds melt away and all sinks back into silence. Apparently. Because what is left for us to hear are the occasional soft thumps and reverberations of tennis balls hitting racquets. Hidden in the darkness of which McLaughlin’s Firebirds are flying towards the past.