As with any self-respecting passion, jazz music does not need to be understood, it is enough to be felt. And in the pages dedicated to it by Sergio Pasquandrea ‒ poet, illustrator and true enthusiast ‒ you can perceive it between the lines.
When you listen to music, after it is finished, it has gone into the air,
you can no longer capture it again. – Eric Dolphy
Jazz is the music of moments. It is made of lightning-fast illuminations, of beauty that flashes and then vanishes in the space of seconds; or fractions of a second. The important thing is never the before or after, but the now. Here and now. To be in the moment is one of the expressions most used by musicians to describe the perfect state of mind, the one essential to create great music.
And there are moments in jazz that seem to condense beauty into almost unbearable doses: the first note of Miles Davis’ solo on So What, the beginning of the F minor riff on A Love Supreme, Louis Armstrong’s introduction to West End Blues.
It was December 5, 1957. A program called “The Sound of Jazz” was on American screens. The CBS television network had put together a cast of giants: Ben Webster, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldrige, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Pee Wee Russell, Thelonious Monk, Mal Waldron. A parade of legends.
At a certain point, about halfway through the program, Billie Holiday began to sing. The piece was a blues, called Fine and Mellow: one of the rare blues in Billie’s repertoire, a great blues singer who almost never sang real blues.
In the band, among the saxophonists, there was also Lester Young. That day he was sick and didn’t even want to play. He was forty-eight, but it was as if he were a hundred. Too much life, too much suffering, too much music, too much junk in his veins. Billie was forty-two, but it wasn’t that he had changed much: he no longer had anything more than a thread of a voice, his art had been consumed by alcohol, drugs, in a life lived without holding back anything.
It seems that the two, once close friends (some say lovers), had hardly spoken to each other for some time. But there comes a moment, after the theme sung by Billie, after Ben Webster’s solo; a moment in which Lester Young gets up, reaches the microphone and begins to play, swaying a little from one side to the other.
And he does one of the most beautiful solos of his life. It’s just over thirty seconds: four or five blues phrases, very simple, elementary. No more than fifty notes, in all. But each one seems squeezed from the marrow of an entire existence spent between the smoke of the clubs and the bottom of the bottles, each one arrives slightly late, as if it didn’t want to leave the instrument, give way to the next (the technical term is to lay back, but on its own it says little or nothing).
And then, Billie’s face. As soon as Lester starts playing, she turns and looks at him, tilting her head, with a tenderness that tightens the heart: she half-closes her eyes, nods. Yes, she seems to think, it’s always him, it’s the old Prez. What would the world be, without that sax? It’s a moment. And it has been defined as “the most beautiful silent solo in the history of jazz”. Then, as soon as Lester’s solo is over, Billie starts singing again…
Both of them, Billie and Lester, had little time left to live, and perhaps they knew it. Lester Young would spend his last months in a room, sealed in an autistic mutism, no longer playing, watching the world pass by behind the glass, nourished only by whiskey. He died on March fifteenth, fifty-nine.
Billie followed him shortly after: on May thirty-first of the same year she was hospitalized for a liver crisis. A policeman was stationed in front of her room, because she was under arrest for drug possession, for the umpteenth time. She passed away on July seventeenth, alone. She had seventy cents in the bank, seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash on her.
Two squalid deaths. And yet that moment alone is enough; those thirty seconds of dazzling beauty are enough to redeem them in the face of eternity. It’s all a matter of moments.
