October Interlude - Keith Jarrett

The sunny days are making a last stand in the golden leaves on the trees opposite my window and the melancholy effect is backed up by Autumn’s whole arsenal of muffled sounds and the general slowing-down of nature. It’s the right time to start attempting to redress the balance, and the clubs where they play jazz seem to be the easiest and most pleasant way – there you can find again that part of your personal time that was interrupted and there you can find once more the old aromas of private time in the old days, preserved in perfumes distilled from the discreet clink of glasses, in the translucent haze of cigarette smoke and the ambiguous hum of voices in a jazz-filled aquarium.

I remember a piece by Brad Mehldau that is in tune with the state of the weather, hunt for it and listen to it again. It is called Airport Sadness and I imagine it as the soundtrack for a film without the tone of images as such, a film in which the characters slide through space, through the glass corridors of airport terminals, where they speak, walk or run, gesticulate, look inwards, slowly pull their baggage trolleys along, talk on the phone, intersect, appear and disappear into anonymity and seem to be coming and going from all directions in a motion that is ambiguous but definite, against a glass background on which can be seen large sections of aircraft sliding slowly forwards and backwards in different parallel planes, and then the sky and more distant regions where you can see, rolling over dizzyingly and shooting into the blue, tiny apparatuses that belong to an immensity of worlds of which we know only a few shards.

And in order to remain under the spell of the same instrument, I hit upon another pianist and begin with an album recorded live at Tokyo ’96 by a royal combination: Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack Dejohnette. An album that emanates the calm of great musicians who no longer need to display their virtuosity and have no need of our competent observations or sympathetic comments in order to maintain their position in the ranking order. Yet any great musician is above our petty pretensions to assign him a place in a system of categories and hierarchies; he slips through our filters, clogged up as they are by the sediment left by lengthy, laboured reasoning that instead of bringing us closer creates a distance between us as between a psychiatrist and his patient. And perhaps this is exactly how we may miss the second in which we could catch Last night when we were young. Lord, what a lot that song title says…and how timeless that second can be! And how this composition connects with the famous atemporal My funny Valentine and the wonderful Never let me go.

I Thought About You and Late Lament from Still Live also belong to this “blue” chromatic, and so does Over the Rainbow from the Scala concert; all show the same sequence-creating technique, with resonances of Handel. And then another piece that is monumental in its dimensions, elaboration, structural diversity and message is For Miles (Davis) from the Bye Bye Blackbird album.

But Keith Jarrett is a pianist who ranges over a broad temperamental spectrum, from brisk rhythms overflowing with energy to a multiculturally-influenced exoticism to solo passages moaned vocally in a kind of personal trance of profound transfiguration.

And now my mind is echoing with My Song as played by Jan Garbarek at the Garana Festival, a piece that can be found on Jarrett’s album of the same name, an album produced by a quartet dominated by this inspired, complex and fascinating pair. And again that old, irresistible bad habit of listening to an atmospheric album, calm and meditative, in the spirit of pub jazz, unsophisticated and possibly even a little “commercial”, which passes beyond music in the direction of an ambiguously sentimental region that has a slightly abandoned element in it, with sepia photographs, golden nuances and soft-focus mercury luminescence, with one’s thoughts left at the mercy of the eternal story whose essence is captured in Round Midnight from the Whisper Not album.

But why am I, Petru, taking the time to write about all this, and with what purpose? In the end, as I am not keeping all this feeling, in its lava-like, chaotically nuanced, haphazard, turbid, threaded and discontinuous form to myself, it could be said that I am writing for somebody. A multiple and anonymous somebody, and I often wonder how much use what I write is to him, and at the same time I wonder if the fact that I am writing is actually only a strictly literary-confessional exercise and “the other” no more than a pretext.

Is that it? And in order not to fall into the trap of my own opening up and thus to transform myself imperceptibly, as I have said before, into Gregory, the insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, into whose soft vulnerable carapace even apples thrown by those near him stick – those who used to be his friends – I will say that I write only from these noble, disinterested literary motives. But in fact I am trying to deceive. Yet I will accept responsibility for this confession. And metamorphosis into All My Tomorrows…