The Music: Soulful Jive

Last Updated on December 30, 2017 by Patrick

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.
George Gershwin.

Did you know that darkness has memories? I found out recently, due to a photographical experience, that one can write in the dark with glowing hands of airlight. Maybe it is a notion I conceived, but it is a feeling described. Darkness is the trace Light left behind while dancing.

I was at a friend’s concert recently and I was practising with photographing her while she was singing. With time, I noticed that her voice is soulful and very complex in a way that it seems choirs are singing in her mouth while acting when and what she chants. It’s like a world within a world, many people in one, but with high pitched notes of happy. An entire tribe singing and dancing in the Sun. Therefore, I enjoy listening to her. She sings from her chest, from her heart.

I was also watching the lights playing on her with mantles of colourful rays. On the stage she was more than a diva, maybe like a soprano of jive, although she is not of african descent, nor of an african-american one. She’s like me from Central Europe, although her artistical appearance seems to be from the far south. Who knows? Maybe she’s one of them souls travelling through time and space.

And this is why I thought of light and memory. It triggers something in my mind and I like it. Although it is not my memory, I feel like it: information I breathe in space. Quite a “tasty” one!

She wore a red dress and the light louvers were blue.. a red dress with blue light on it! I felt like this was the Soul of Jazz. Just like back in the ’20’s and ’30’s when George and Ira Gershwin were composing and playing trying to outmanoeuvre the musical realm as they were about to conquer the world of arts, playing with colours on a musical sheet while others were playing on canvases.

Shooting in the dark is not easy. One moment and the light broke into a pause like a requiem. Long blue notes were uttered from the mouth, the melodic sounds of the instruments and from the Soul.. her Soul. I kept a keen eye and shot the scene immortalizing it with joy of every moment while listening. The loom was ready and the black textures were there weaving a story. As abstract as it may seem, even though human and humane, the story was of light in a very unique, simple, though, moment of soulful jive. No person was to touch this story and become any part of it.

And the song was not of jazz at all, but of a popular music since many decades ago. I remember its origins, thought, and can’t forget them. It sprout from secular popular music of hundreds of years ago, then went to become chamber music, jazz music, blues, than with a touch of rhythm and voila: pop, as the culture embraced it and we dance to it even though outside the dancefloor as well.

I can never have enough of jazz, you know. The blue notes are vibrations of blue lights all over the board on which it lives. The scene is of a warm colour, though, and the air tastes like chocolate. What a mirage I perceive with my scrutinizing eyes of mind! Men and women of both dark and pale shades of skin are tunning into one another and singing. Passion? Maybe, but I’d rather say it was the fruit of living together, not alone.

The light triggered my eyes again while roaming the stage and beyond, in the audience, making me feel a mingle. I felt pain also, as if I was in a prison as an experiment in times of the Great Sadness after the Second War. If black people, as they were called, lived in ghettos, overseas from us, we too were living in similar confines while being very closely watched by our very brothers and sisters. But our sadness was not sadness at all. We never let it conquer our Soul and feast of it. We never left the realms of gladness. And, although we were very few in numbers, with the majority of our fellow men ruined both within themselves and without, we were navigating life as if on an ocean of fire with wooden boats. But we were never burnt. We lasted for decades till the present moment. And here we are. Roughed, but alive, still.

Then the red light came roaming on stage and the experiment was over. I was back to myself. I was back to the place I was for real, at the concert. She started singing louder and more beautiful, I noticed. The lights were also dancing faster and although I drifted, I came back to a conclusion: music is never late and the assurance of life is the new. So I improvise my life based on my certainties. Light will guide and help me as She pulls my very little hand. My wee finger’s on the trigger and I press the shutter: I didn’t shoot the sheriff, I just embraced Light while I immortalized Her.

Light, to me, is like a beautiful woman – true in her own nakedness and home early. Every of Her photons are Her spaceships of conception impregnating the world to remind us of what we are made of.

So, the concert was over and my practise? ..It wasn’t. I kept on seeing and photographing as I was shutting my eyelids. Light and Music is always with me to help me practise. Light is Her and Music is Her Voice: my Muse entirely.