Page 9 - Jazz

Buena vista social jazz

In the late sixties and early seventies I did not know the
meaning of jazz. I was a non-conformist, rebellious, long-haired lad
who used to go to the clubs where Timişoara groups played and the
few discotheques that existed and listen to pop, blues and progressive.
Then my friendship with the other music lovers unexpectedly brought
me the role of disk jockey, that is, a kind of “person who puts the music
on” in weekend clubs. I began with a few dozen records from my
friend Sandu G’s collection which I played on the record players in the
club on the top floor of the University of Medicine hall of residence,
where the faculty chapel had been in the past.
As I listened and listened again I went through all the stages of
evolution from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, from supergroups like Cream
and Jimi Hendrix & Co., from soul and then blues, to experimental
groups like Vanilla Fudge, Soft Machine, Mothers of Invention etc.
etc.
I listened with unquenchable thirst to any radio station that
broadcast the music of the day. Radio Free Europe at 5 pm and
then, late at night, repeats of Cornel Chiriac’s show and then Radio
Luxembourg. But those closest to me both literally and figuratively
were “the Serbs” with their radio and television stations in Novi Sad
which broadcast almost all the major festivals, festivals which thus
echoed behind the Iron Curtain. We were living in the middle of the
Pop era, with everything that meant, in the wake of the Flower Power
years. We were happy to wear jeans and flowery shirts with our long
hair and beards and proud if we could escape when raided by the
militia who waged war against our fetishes of style and dress. Music
was the pigment, the personifying organic substance that caused
Timişoara to be regarded as the most avant-garde city in Romania
(“the Wild West of Romania”), inhabited by a cosmopolitan public
seated at the windows of the country that faced towards Yugoslavia
(for which the people of Timişoara felt great admiration), Hungary
and (for those with German ethnic family connections) Germany and
Austria, a public who wore their claim to be different with a certain
ostentation in a world of imposed uniformity that was both docile and

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