A jazz tale: The folly of calling mastery
I renewed my vows with jazz last night. It’s not that I had fallen out of love with her. We both just thought we could do better — ya know, hang out together more often, start having “date nights” again.
As we looked into each other’s eyes, we remembered how much we loved each other, how we were meant to be together forever, how we met, and all the memories we shared. The butterflies in my stomach came back. I was offered a seat but I couldn’t sit; how do you sit when you’re standing for something?
As I listened, I went into a place I had forgotten, where the world and all its woes disappears, just me and her, no one else, just beauty, searching, probing the endless interplay of harmony and dischord — star-gazing with cakes.
Marvelling when there is true synergy, squirming when there isn’t. Watching musical democracy in action, straight note chasing selfimportance out of the window.
I stood there reassured that I had, all those years ago, found the human of my dreaming, the woman I couldn’t live without, even if we weren’t together. In good times, in bad times, till death do us part. And then — in the middle of a particularly delicate and evocative flourish on the keyboard, someone leaned over to me and said: “Yeah, yeah, but he’s become arrogant.”
The music was so beautiful that The country’s history includes a significant exodus of its most valuable jewels prompted by past political climates. Families were broken apart. Circumstance forced locals from their homes, their origins, their ancestral bearing. Living out their lives in alien spaces where assimilation meant adopting an unfamiliar culture. An intentional loss of self for the sake of survival while still clinging to home. Voodoo.
Noun.
A magical practice combining ritual, religion and tradition characterised by sorcery and spirit possession. it numbed the sucker punch to my face. I would only later realise how much that comment put my nose out of joint. Something is wrong. There’s an insidious stranglehold that has dug its tentacles into the collective hearts of the youth. It squeezes. An incremental tightness closing in.
It manifests in ways that debilitate mentally. Physically.
It silently crushes. It feels like there’s no getting out from under it. No getting away. No way out.
In the documentary Generation Anxiety, British singer-songwriter and pianist Laura Mvula admits to the struggle she has been carrying.