On classical feeling and modern framing - Charles Lloyd

The temptation to constantly look out of the window. However I sit, I try to have within eye’s reach fragments of trees and buildings over which there passes lighting of different intensities from that inner camera which takes pictures even in the absence of any intention to look, stores them, takes them out again and reprojects them, sometimes, when I am not expecting it to, in the atmosphere of a given moment and a particular place that are far from the present.

I am listening to an impressive piece that reminds me of the much-lamented Esbjörn Svensson, a track from an album by a young American trumpeter, Christian Scott: Litany against fear. Strangely close this backing to the piano accompaniment, you would say it was the same hand continuing (in the vast perspective of life) to take part in the great performance, spanning with sound the distance between continents and modelling itself on the blowing of the trumpet. And although I am sitting here in the depths of late autumn, a mysterious metamorphosis all at once changes the scene into one of spring. And so it is spring again and rain is falling. I opened the window and entered the smell of rain freshly fallen on just-sprouted vegetation and on dusty earth and on the summer-houses of dry wood in the garden and on the low hum of the city, since I frequently think of the low hum of the city as a background sound from which I cannot escape and from which, in any case, I would probably not even be happy to escape. And against the background of Charles Lloyd’s Hymn to the Mother, which settles itself out little by little as the disjointed notes fall, my restless and image-creating thoughts jump from place to place, grouping and regrouping, pushing each other away, trying to disentangle and organise themselves, as if each of them had a separate and totally anarchic life.

. And so it strikes me that the world of jazz of an ambient, blue, melodic character is populated especially by women’s voices whose coloratura is well suited to atmospheric jazz and matches the discreet lighting you find in locales deep in the basements of buildings, with their thick supporting walls and vaulted ceilings, with the exposed brick of former times, with their walls covered in sepia photographs and yellowed newspapers, with the low sound and rustling of constant slow movement, with a minimal band which seconds intermezzos from the piano half-obscured by the silver-blue tones of cigarette smoke and muffled voices.

Thus the essence of these locales whose time is almost over is a complex auditory composition in which the sound of the music is soaked in the sound of a slice of life lived at a slowed-down rhythm; what is produced is a kind of strange quintessence that is entirely different from that in a concert hall or a private performance, a unique alchemy of sensations in an evening that may be remembered as equally unique. And the poetry of this style of listening is on the way to being lost as a result of the healthy way in which the efficient mind of contemporary man wants to sanitise everything. What will a locale of this kind look like in the future without the fine wreaths of cigarette smoke that flavour the air and visibility in the room?

What will a locale where jazz is played look like in a future concentrated in spaces composed of cold materials –metal, glass fixings, bolts, moulded plastic furniture with harshly-coloured metal frames, lines that are equally cold, rigid and impersonal and which seem to support the idea of “simple well-aired spaces”, the economy of that same always-invoked modernity, perpetuated in every formula employed in successive generations as a kind of alibi to cover up any and every cultural adventure? Where will be the warm resonance of the walls, the friendly feel of the massive wooden boards that we can rest our elbows on in leisurely fashion, touch and beat time on with our fingers, the tones of ochre and sepia that emanate from the very material essence of the room so richly decorated with old objects and memorabilia, older and newer fetishes? What will become of the opportunities the eye has to rove around in an everywhere of objects that compete to offer to the sight their infinitude of forms and uses, all now wreathed in the olfactory mystery of time past?
And it may be that most jazz is talking about precisely this, the eternal story of nostalgia for time past; the joy of escaping into a region of sound where improvisation (the freedom to add a suitable tone depending on the artist’s instinct, his state and the inspiration of the moment and pure spontaneity) is little more than the private expression of the quest for the eternal mystery of time that will come: a soothing balm for the lack of peace of our present.

But rather than continue along this train of thought that is filling me with melancholy, I let it slip into the restless ocean that fills my being and listen to Gothic Jazz Dance from David Benoit’s album Professional Dreamer. And this makes me get up from my armchair and take a few steps around the room in a kind of waltz which imitates what I imagine could be a prelude, for a long late November evening.