I imagine Chet Baker blindly tuning his trumpet to the first notes of Almost Blue, the song he borrowed from Elvis Costello to make a custom suit. I also imagine Charlie Parker searching for his vein, while in his head the bird of inspiration pecks at a melodic line from Stravinsky.
Jazz and its excesses have been with me for half my life, ever since I used to wander around Madrid sharing my solitude with the ghosts of a city that mixes gunshots with saliva and squid with sugar. I remember a rainy night, looking for a place that was open to buy tobacco, where I met a woman whose name has been erased by time, but not her memory or her voice, as she sang “Sophisticated Lady” whispering into the microphone like Ella Fitzgerald.
It was in a jazz club near Castellana that no longer exists, but that I will always remember as the place where we met. She sang on stage while I dried my raincoat on the back of a chair. After the performance, I asked the waiter to get her a drink. She was quick to thank me and, with a wave of her hand, indicated that we should sit in the dark. “We need no more light than the fire in our bodies,” he whispered in my ear.
Now these things come to mind when I read that El Molino, the legendary Barcelona cabaret, is going to reopen its doors and that jazz musicians and singers will perform on its stage. I always knew that cities needed these types of concert venues, concert halls where a saxophone lights the fire that serves as an intermediary between the asphalt of the street and the cemetery. Few are the places that shelter hearts in need of affection, the bar counters where you can untie your tie, while a jazz singer stirs memory and desire.
When there is no turning back and your breath smells of lies, the best thing to do is to untangle the notes of a life devoted to the absurdity of living to work. Without a doubt, jazz is the fuse that can push you to leave everything behind. It happened to me, as I said, when I met that woman who sang like Ella Fitzgerald and who relieved the weight of the rain by teaching me that pleasures are so similar to crimes that sometimes they merge into one. I learned this last thing by letting the smoke fill my mouth.
Until that night I didn’t know that the soul was in the lungs and that jazz is the best food for those who still dare to dream that one of these nights they will live a beautiful love story where Chet Baker’s music appears enveloping the good darkness; a literary excess between two bodies that will soon say goodbye, no matter how long it takes for the last train to appear in the dying light of twilight.
