Rest for the Traveller – Jean Luc Ponty

When I allow musical energies to pass through me, I draw up a hierarchy of values in which my inner potential has to be reconsidered and put in order depending on what I feel and what I perceive as being beyond a simple belonging to the everyday. This is another way of saying that it does me good to detach myself and that by doing so I can enter a zone of protection from which I draw strength and inner peace and where I find the motivation to seek for the reason for my movement in time which consumes itself in accordance with a convention that the years follow each other one by one but also in terms of a chemical process that treats me as an object subject to decay, integrated in this process of cosmic consumption and differentiated from the other objects in it precisely by my previous awareness of the process and my ability to perceive the changes as they happen.

The paradox is that although I know this, I head through the passage destined for me with my foot flat on the gas, compressing the hours and days into a story in which, with my heart in my mouth, I eagerly await and long for the next event, the next moment that promises to be – I dare to hope – better than all that have gone before. Surely very different from the wise words of Matei Calinescu, who whispered to his character Zacharias Lichter: “He who hurries, hurries to die”. But almost all of us do nothing but opt for the minimum pass mark, and this even after we have shared with understanding in all the experiences of the well known lesson and talk about divine discontent, about intensity of consumption as a value in itself, and about what will come tomorrow, as if we were thirsty to abolish today.

But all the same, today has an extra chance of remaining present, as it is, polluted by presentiments and fragments of the puzzle that is tomorrow, when the thought comes to me to listen to a musician who had the truly enviable experience of playing alongside the great masters of jazz of the twentieth century: Jean Luc Ponty. Choosing to end his career as a violinist (jazz experts call him a pioneer of the electric violin) but bringing to this all he had learned from playing the piano, the clarinet and the sax, Ponty found his place at the interface between genres, from all of which he drew nuances, modalities, techniques and themes in the recuperative and unifying spirit of fusion.

J.L.P. is characterised by a rich, vigorous style with flowing melodic lines – a style temperamentally supported by the fellow members of his group – though he frequently leaves room for pieces of a more meditative hue, interior commentaries and dialogues with extended, drawn-out sounds which identify themselves and give, with a wide range of suggestivity, their names to the tracks.

To conform (with some difficulty) to a dry, technical style of presentation, I may say of J.L.P. that he is a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire and that he and Stéphane Grappelli have equal claims to be regarded as the most distinguished and most influential of European jazz violinists. I mention this point for the benefit of those who view jazz from the exalted heights of black suits, starched shirts and bow ties and who are unable to step out of the mould of a classical manner of perceiving things that is conservative , in its pretensions and in its habit of bon-ton mimicry.

Because the profound depth that has been reached by much jazz music and particularly by European jazz deserves to be taken very seriously, especially perhaps by the consumers of operetta, which, as a frothy, facile, playful and optimistic spectacle, embodies the easily digestible story of the still marginal musical experience of “real” music. But I am talking about an otherwise and I know that it is all to the good that our world is enriched by the existence of such otherwises, intermediaries . The correlation between the technical aspect of art and the condition of perplexity, between what can happen and what has already happened, is always mediated by someone outside ourselves.

Let us use the name of Mediators for those from among whom we can choose someone who can with a gesture stop time and take us through this breach between the previous moment and the one that is about to come and place us in a loop outside time, somewhere to where man’s biological existence cannot penetrate and where absolute happiness is probably possible, and where the health of our mind is probably possible and where probably it is possible that once you go in, something of our individual existence remains for ever, and where probably the Great Encounter between all of us is possible, where what is natural is certainly possible. And where God is certainly possible, maybe even as Naomi Ginsberg, the mother of the notorious poet, met him: “Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder – he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y, the chicken] farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.

I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper - lentil soup, vegetables, bread&butter – mitlz – he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.

I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there. What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?

I try, he said – That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.”

The Mystical Adventures Suite. But the same thing also happens in the Cosmic Messenger album with its vaguely “blue” coloratura, especially in Ethereal Mood and in I only feel good with you, a piece in a sensitive register that perfectly captures the state of simultaneous fulfillment and uncertainty that is conveyed by the idea of the wellbeing of closeness, an ideal expressed through fullness of sound and meditative inflexions but also through a presentiment of uncertainty, as is clearly the case in the track that gives its name to the album – possibly one of the most beautiful of jazz “ballads”.

It is the same with Cosmic Messenger from the album of that name, a piece that expresses nostalgia for the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a piece characterised by recollection but also by the replacing of an experience into an exploration of the present moment, a tribute to his belonging, more or less intuitively, to the incredibly complex state created by John McLaughlin and of the wizardry with which McLaughlin unified the contributions of a whole gallery of musicians who later spun off from that alchemical planet to become masters and unifiers in their own right.

The feel of Cosmic Messenger can also (I think) be found in Imaginary Voyage, an album of reverberations and processed sound, bursting with atmosphere but lacking the complexity and depth of Inner Mounting Flame. These can be found here and there in Part IV, but to a rhythm that is slightly alien, tending towards rock. That experience of the corrupting extravagant style of Frank Zappa (a restless, technique-dominated and hyperproteic burlesque) could not fail to leave its mark. Nothing wrong in that, only that it makes it different. But in Mirage from the Enigmatic Ocean album, with its repeated and layered rhythms forming a background for the meandering commentary of the electric violin, clearly narrative, crafting “with profound elegance” the melodic lines of an exceptional musical construction, I find it easier to be reconciled even to a slide towards this different. Apart from this, the most complex demonstration of what J.L.P.means is the French anthology “Le Voyage”, where you can find the two doses of the now moment which I value without any fear of becoming addicted. Because I am addicted anyway. Just as I am addicted to looking out of the window, which belongs to the now moment, just as I am addicted to the sublime restlessness of the now moment and to those who manipulate my affections and to the ingredients of illusion and to the strand of air knotted between the moment just past and the one which seems to be coming, to nostalgia for what seems to be Once a blue planet. To the moment when my voyage will come to rest In the kingdom of peace.