Miles and Zavinul in eternity

With the intention of writing a few words about what I am listening to at a particular moment, I realise that I do not feel any interest – nor is it my role – in rehashing all kinds of information and dates into well-informed fluency, logically faultless and certainly, as is only right and proper, intelligent. I probably ought to be more relaxed and to list dates and details about the way the various instruments work together in the composition, or about the origin of the themes and the stories of the people who are bringing them alive for us, about their famous faces and what we know about them, and about what we know less of, about the covered-up stories or public actions that have stirred media interest, or about my simple and disturbing memories of them, of words magically uttered at a particular moment…

But all these things, although I do not regard them as either pointless or to be neglected, are still so external, because all that the character within my inmost being will allow me to do is to sink deeper into my chair, to melt into the surrounding matter, or to put one elbow on the table and rest my head on my hand, enjoying the buzz of voices around me and any other murmuring of living life, enjoying the melancholy feelings that overwhelm me, the vague fragments of thoughts that wander through my mind, the luminescent presence of those around me, the way in which I listen to music to a point at which I disappear from the room, from the universe of objects on which I depend and which contain me and my appearance in myself.

Then, when the final sounds die away, I surface, reappear and remember Joe Zavinul, who said that he wanted his tombstone to say beside his date of birth “born on earth” - “born in eternity”. And I remember Miles Davis in his concert in Paris and how, in a voice that was weary, unreal and almost inaudible, he seemed to be calling on Zavinul to somehow as it were help him in the coming eternity: Jo..., Jo..., Jo...Jooo ... Only for him too, a few months later, to cross the threshold that leads to remaining Eternal...

Although for me Jazz has become a kind of therapy and a necessity, like the need to see my dog sleeping peacefully under my desk or following me from room to room or even going a few steps in front of me and constantly turning his head to make sure I am going in the direction he has anticipated, I have never really been “hooked” by the Big Bands or the large-scale orchestral arrangements that were in fashion around the middle of the last century. And I would not have been all that impressed by Davis’ concert at Montreux under the baton of Quincy Jones if it hadn’t been, after all, Miles Davis, who was already there in my mind as a magnificent character belonging to the world of lyrical, introspective jazz. And I would not have been all that impressed by the large number of Grammy awards “for both Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Soloist or Small Group and Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Large Group” that he received for almost all his albums if these had not been recordings made together with a number of absolutely first-class instrumentalists such as the pianists Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Joe Zavinul, the saxophonists John Coltrane, George Coleman and Wayne Shorter and that giant among guitarists John McLaughlin.

For most of us, the names listed here are just names with a foreign resonance. Yet each of them represents a whole musical territory, a significant island in the archipelago of jazz, all places where we may be able to take refuge when the pressure of “today” threatens to crush us with its obligations, its responsibilities, the rebuffing of our wishes and aspirations, and the effect of the unforeseeable workings of the minds of “the others”.

It is very hard to choose just one Miles Davis album. Sometimes, when time has been more generous to me, I have listened to live recordings of some of his concerts which had left my retinas imprinted with the image of a wind player in shiny, richly-coloured clothes, his eyes protected by huge dark glasses, and have “seen” him playing. With his hand on a pink trumpet over which bends a chiselled face carved in severe lines, animated by the moments in which he forces air into the trumpet or shifts his wad of chewing gum around, pacing to and fro in sympathy with John Coltrane in Green Dolphin Street – in concert in Stockholm, or in his famous Paris concert in 1991, in the company of the “sacred monsters”, his face streaked with drops of sweat from his effort to reconcile the strange life of an artist with the magic of sound, in order to then let the sounds settle at his feet like a carpet over which he would walk, some months later, towards his place in the Time after time. Time after Time.