Page 17 - Jazz

Requiem for the E.S.T.

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, Timişoara. 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 allencompassing absolute of concentration, to everything
Esbjörn Svensson ever played right up to his sinking into the absolute.

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