Requiem for the E.S.T. - Esbjörn Svensson

The authors of some novels you feel you can’t be separated from regularly kill off their characters. Or, even more disturbingly, they kill off the person who is the most loved by and most existential for and supposed to be the salvation of the main character.

A “technical” ricochet stroke, terrible and devastating. Such authors are imitating the action of the supreme creator, who kills his dearest creation, his favourite characters: human beings. The more priceless a character, the more certainly does he seem destined for that inevitable disappearance which leaves those who also came close to him perplexed and in terrible pain. The good people are the dear ones, the ones whose departure is “untimely” and whose absence becomes a wound that can never heal.

. This is what keeps happening in the last few French novels I have read, books by Andrei Makine and Michel Houellebecq. And so it happened in the realm created by the god of Jazz when one of its most valiant and innovative pianists, the Swede Esbjörn Svensson, lay down to sleep in the depths of a fjord, thus acting out a final scene which leaves regrets and a sense of suffering that for some of us is indeed personal.

It was only a few months before the pianist’s death that I had seen the Esbjörn Svensson Trio in concert at the National Theatre, Timisoara. Should I say that I experienced that concert as a major revelation? If I were to play with superlatives, I believe I would use up most of them, and I know that I cannot do this (my conscience would make common cause with subjectivism to prevent me) because I would end up being unable to go on to talk about anyone else. But that is how it is: the screenplay must go on, with different characters and different farewell scenes where the elegiac waltz-time melodic line embroidered with strange whispers from a scarcely-imagined world leads us on – as far as it will be granted to it to do (Still).

It may be that a different set of superlatives needs to be invented for each and every jazz group that attains such a level. Or perhaps the very fact that they come to my mind and that when they do so I feel a kind of lump in my throat, an emotion and a tremor that totally banish any wish to listen to anything else for the moment; I want to listen, all at once, concentrated into a single second in an all encompassing absolute of concentration, to everything Esbjörn Svensson ever played right up to his sinking into the absolute.

It may be that this frisson of “greed” is a reaction to the feeling that time is slipping through my fingers and that my enjoyment of the present could end at any moment and that I would like to “swallow whole” all his tracks and albums and to drink in all the hidden meanings of the names of the tracks and albums. And take Reminiscence of a soul as an example – a track that synthesises musical experience, a true progressive fusion of classical jazz and drum’n’bass, simple electronic elements, through which there goes the vital and anticipatory beat of a crescendo sustained by sensitive techniques and the vigour of drum’n’bass; pop, rock and funky rhythms, through which there goes the vital beat that leads up into a final great crescendo.

Or the apocalyptic Premonition Earth from the Leucocyte album, or the piano cavalcade at the end of his farewell concert. Live Jazz in memory of Esbjörn Svensson. A dance of false pretensions for a death that wants to take everything. A dance of instruments inspired by the living spirit of Esbjörn Svensson and the thunderous time-stopping applause that makes way for peaceful sleep in the shadow of the eternal sea, enveloped in what he was able to give to the world and that is now reflected upon him as an absolute of eternal giving. The blowing of those left within earshot of the mournful electric trumpet, a kind of blues that will always echo for us when we remember “the good and beautiful things of former times” as one remembers one’s more or less distant youth of which only rays of sunlight have remained.

Yesterday I listened to Viaticum again and today I have listened to Tuesday Wonderland, two albums with coloratura and intensity perfectly blended to satisfy my modest listener’s thirst, that “eclectic mixture of classic, melodic jazz and electronic coupled with elements of energetic rock”, and among all the disjointedness and interruptions caused by all kinds of activities, finally, at sunset, I had the feeling that I was back in a time long ago, when it seemed that I was waiting for news and it seemed that this news was coming from further and further away and it seemed that I could anticipate fragments of still-future concerts that time would allow me to attend, superimposed upon the memory film of concerts that had remained permanently imprinted on the forefront of my mind. And I no longer know if this sensation is part of the real world or if it belongs to some alchemy of music, images that filter through colours, scraps of sentences, gestures, silences. And then nothing is real any more but comes rather from a parallel world inhabited by a fascination with understanding and feeling the first one. Why do we feel as we do? And why does this happen differently from usual when someone has gone away for ever? The answer may be discovered in Elevation of Love or Believe, Beleft, Below on the Seven Days of Falling album. One of the answers.