Wednesday, a touchy day - listening to Charlie Haden

Experimentation is only a plan to escape from stereotypes, from method, from the frailty of anticipation, a game played on the edges of things already learned, a testing out of improvisations and the delight of discovering a new pleasure in the structure of the original pleasure. But when a bassist like Charlie Haden teams up with Ginger Backer and Bill Frisell to play Our Spanish Love Song, I am left wanting nothing more than a bolthole in the jazz of a dimly-lit pub, where I can listen to Alone Together or Lady in the Lake (Charlie Haden and Quartet West) in the company of a glass of wine that casts a red shadow on my hand, as I surreptitiously watch the girl at a nearby table chattering distractedly and the leisurely way she lights her cigarette and how she shapes her lips to blow a long thin plume of smoke towards the ceiling and how she twists two fingers around the rim of her glass. Without it mattering to me that I am suffering for something that didn’t even happen. A state that takes over when Billie Holliday echoes in my mind – my first great love, discovered in a modest record shop in a narrow back street in Tubingen. Deep Song.

And then in a coming-and-going of “tame” jazz, calm and full of lyrical quality, recorded by Haden and Michael Brecker, backed up by no other than the amazing Brad Mehldau at the piano (a few “lost” guides to the American dream), I glide over the loop of time, since what goes on in this moment of listening that is full of peace and calm emotion opens up for me a small crack in the obsessive trap known as “living in the present” and even brings me a measure of detachment from what I ought to be concentrating on right now: effectiveness within my social timeframe, my “important and useful” role, my engagement diary with its priority lists and its countless tick boxes against things I haven’t done yet but need to do, things waiting their turn to exert their devouring pressure on me.

In other words, a way of appealing to the things that I ought to regard as vital, to the “firm” gestures of political clans and the insinuating verbal modulations of television presenters, the civic responsibility associated with elections, the vehemence of promises and the gallery of current public personalities, ephemeral little mandarins and big businessmen weighed down by their dramatic destiny, an irreplaceable world……Twaddle. Pointless...

And I need to defend myself and so I listen to the track Silence from the album of the same name (Billy Higgins, Chet Baker and Enrico Pieranunzi) and think of several tiny snowflakes sticking to each other and then to another one and yet another one until they achieve the consistency of a fragile snowball rolling down in a weak imitation of an avalanche. Seeking, in fact, an increase of warmth, the solidarity that we constantly talk about and which springs from a perception and understanding of the existence of the other as a path to our own existence.

And in order not to become a prey to melancholy I listen to My Funny Valentine, which brings a wave of sunshine, and then Round midnight, classic pieces which float, return and embody themselves chameleon-like in big concerts, as if to rediscover a red thread of Jazz running through the tentatives and escapes, through the impressions left by the personalities of instrumentalists of genius, which haunt us like wandering angels, like missionaries preaching faith in the healing virtues of sound.

This sounds archaic and oversensitive, Ioachim tells me, this is what happens when you have too much time to spend on your own and when you suddenly feel that you’ve been saying something too much anyway and it’s time you stopped, made a break and rounded it off with a “value” judgment. But you can never find the right word to close with and you cannot put your hand on any other intelligent replacement for it, as a kind of supporting point to look for with apparent ostentation . Something about which you can say to yourself that if only you could find it things would be far simpler, as otherwise you have to pay for all the other possible solutions, all contaminated by their belonging to the everyday, solutions that demand a price that may even be as high as life itself.

But there is no point in going that far. Anyway, any “value judgment” is entirely external and irrelevant when you listen to music, and sometimes all you need to do is to close your eyes and keep imagining the scene in which the girl at the next table is chattering distractedly bathed in diffuse honey-coloured light, gesticulating lazily and unraveling her translucent strands of cigarette smoke into the air, while her fingers circle round the lip of her glass to awake a strange, long-drawn-out sound that weaves its way through all the other sounds and wraps you hypnotically in a profound fusion with your slight rocking on the chair and the movement of your hand which, left to its own devices, from time to time quietly and gently taps out the rhythm of Twilight Song or Waltz for Ruth from the Night and the City album, where another pianist of contemplative jazz, Kenny Barron, has a memorable conversation with Charlie Haden.

And the magic of that same waltz played by Charlie Haden in the company of an extremely sensitive guitarist, a native of the world of rock but thoroughly assimilated to jazz (Pat Metheny), in another superb album, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Because it contains what you wanted to find earlier, perhaps exactly that need to speak the word – saving point of deliverer, but totally different, terribly different, overpoweringly by this “different” than how you have ever known it.

Now I know for certain that I am suffering from an incurable disease that can be blamed on some alchemist’s potion for life that contains fine particles of melted metal; it floats in the air around me when I listen to pieces like Always say goodbye, a subtle reconciliation of time past and time present. And the only certainty I have in this time present is that I do not want to be “exorcised” of its anarchic possessing spirits, because all is well with me and I have a kind of peace and it is Wednesday, when I have chosen to do nothing but sit and look over the edge of the day.