On the archipelago as a microcosm of the sensible world

I remember how I felt that first time when I received jazz as a kind of communion, in ’73-’74, as I listened to Paul Weiner in a basement in Piaţa Maria, in the period when long hair and

military parkas and Che Guevara badges were all the rage and when I was trying to be part of a sort of latter-day ‘peace army’ which, paradoxically, represented the avant garde of Romanian society at that time, in a city that was reckoned to be the Wild West of Romania, the place where ‘great’ groups played pop music and witnessed the first mass movements as people headed for concert halls and for the Stadium, which on these occasions was guarded by cordons of militia

There, in the amniotic fluid in which there bubbled the seeds of the coming revolution, seethed a rebellious world hidden under the layers of makeup that characterised the period of the ‘new man’, makeup influenced by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a worn-down Communism, a Communism of the periphery overlaid upon a Balkan world that did not even understand itself, piloted in a derivative fashion by insignificant people, and all this within a sea of hypocrisy in which generation after sacrificed generation drowned in turn.

In this grey, hallucinatory world there nevertheless came into existence a fragile archipelago in which one could live differently, even if only for a few moments, where literature, music and art could be prized as a kind of spice for a number of tolerated addicts who were too ‘sick’ to be treated with the ideological medication of the period and completely beyond reclaiming for the healthy society of the new man, that society which offered sacrifice to itself in fake zeal for the good of a country whose uneasy slumbers were constantly haunted by the will of the wisp of emigration.

A mother-fatherland that one lived with in a step-relationship, in a vicious circle of hunger, hatred, denunciations, cold and disgust, of fury suffocated in inertia, of self-abandonment to the self-inoculation of belief in a twisted destiny. In this world, where small truths and illuminations could take place only as islands, people played quality jazz in a stubborn determination to resist the omnipresence of cosmeticised folklore, to make their way between the “cranes, mariners, sunsets” and obvious sentiments of light music, in tacit competition with the music of the wingspan groups who amalgamated and distilled the open expression of non-submission with the image of the well-behaved rebel taking refuge in the wattage of their speakers, each group in their own way but still cultivating a manner of life that was different from day-to-day reality, a way of becoming an individual and of finding a/some meaning that it was worth dedicating oneself to.

And this in correlation with the climate of the islands of this archipelago, a climate that was called culture, that is, the breath of the sensible world that activates the mind and soul to seek for a reason for living that goes beyond mere biological inertia. Or, to summarise, we are in fact speaking about catharsis in its profound definition as the purifying effect of art that frees us (as a famous Greek said) from the “baser passions” and also from reducing our existence to primary needs and the fundamental necessities of life.

I learned to walk in a world of sound composed of this kind of ‘remedy’ and was happy to get to know musicians with whom I shared this blessedness and also the blessedness that you receive from intuitive friendship and the warmth friendship radiates. I was able to get to know Johnny Raducanu in a relationship that got behind his appearance and role as a public figure, a role that split his personality and left on the surface only his exoticism and his tendency to fit in with the world of the spectator, be it auditorium, mass media or simply “the world of the others”. This friendship brought us vulnerable intimacy, calm togetherness, wordless communication in shared listening, the silence of hearing our own inner voices and of confession.

I experienced this unique irradiation of friendship that dissolves physical distances, and I listened to Teodora Enache, and I listened to Liviu Butoi, and I listened to Eugen Gondi and to the pop “dissidents” of the Kamocsa Bella or Mircea Florian , and to those who radiated/exuded style and calm like Johnny Bota and Tony Kuhn, to Mircea Tiberian and Harry Taviatian, to Puiu Pascu, Aura Urziceanu and Anca Parghel (she who has gone to the Eternal East) and to many others who whispered to me something impossible to share, since our feelings, lava-flowing, subtle and creative as they are, cannot translate into/express in words what we have received into the very substance of our being, which…is that whisper of the Absolute Being of which we are part and which we continue to experience as long as our portions of life (and hence of feeling) endure, which comes from always and will leave for always.

I listened to Summertime interpreted in a huge variety of ways and realized that a jazz Summertime can have the same resonance as Summertime sung by the inimitable Janis Joplin and can even plumb the depths from which you feel a tear for Cosmic Blues preparing to well up. And I discovered Summertime within myself as a part of Mozart’s Requiem, or echoes of the clavichord used by Bach and Handel, or like the delicate sounds modulated in more recent times by Portishead or Massive Attack, together with the strange perfumes of concert halls where it seems that even the sound enters the olfactory nerve in order to penetrate even more deeply into the memory, where it remains in a distilled state with its identity multiplied to the absolute. STATE without passivity. Without duality. The state of feeling the inner presence of Being pausing to rest within us for an instant, the Being that comes from always and will return to always.