blue shadow

Ahmad Jamal - "Saturday Morning (Reprise)" by JazzVillage

There was a word in her heart, and it was as cold as ice.

Biber's Mystery:
The first notes of the music, like everything else, cleave to their origin. There is sigh, and it is like the first frost on a dark window.

You turn the heating on, gently, and the glaze on the glass thins out, evaporates, first at the edges, then at the centre which becomes bright, radiant, clear. The world is seen in a moment of clarity, as if one were coming out of a thicket, out of deep north. It isn't more beautiful, nor does it make more sense, but that moment of appearance brings about a certain delight.

Elephants have the saddest eyes imaginable, almost human-like. I look at a child's face and think of your warm eyes. Is a gaze transferable down the centuries?

Grapefruit pips remind me of tiny fragments of whale bone: bleached, square and fragile, flattened out like folded envelopes.

Jazz seems to reach out for connections...and finds them! The soul of jazz: purity, structure, improvisation. Baroque?

In cricket there is a kind of genius who has what appears to be a limitless repertoire of appropriate responses (gestures): the ability to deflect, to late cut, the dance out, to play straight, to defend, to stroke (through the cover), to time to perfection, to thump, to guide, to steer, to find the gaps, to steal...the swashbuckling cut, the hook (where getting into the right position is everything)...it is a type of wisdom to know how to respond to each particular situation, even to know when to 'leave alone', to know one's bearings, or acknowledge the fact when one is beaten. For this kind of genius the line between instinct and learning is blurred.

M. Ozil is another kind of genius since he brings out the best in other players, sees where they might be, what potential they have, and creates space for them without being too flashy himself. Each 'gesture' is about allowing others to flourish, to find their form. The more he renounces his self, the more he finds it.

Saturday Morning:

'At his most fluid there don't seem to be enough keys on the piano to accommodate his dazzling runs...'

___

Saturday morning, before the holidays come to a close, snowed in, the Radio Times frayed, the memory of a feast, the turning of the New Year, the seeds of expectations, the beautiful silence and stillness of the first day. Saturday morning in January, the light bright, dazzling, the cold air on your face, your hands dry as leaves, the whetting of fingers to turn the pages of the Guardian Review, the old tree with its torn branches, its melancholy inwardness. An amazing sense of freedom and lightness, freedom from the weight of the world.

What does it mean to hold on to a tune, through all that time, to keep the thread running, letting it return, accepting, finally, the distances we allow ourselves? And yet, not accepting them, since memory holds them up to you, and you stare into them, as if through a latticework of ice. What is this blue shadow that others see in my face?