John Coltrane
The John Coltrane Quartet Plays

Once upon a time. And it has happened many times.

The counterclockwise moment of reflection on the short-legged issues that led me to cause so much avoidable chaos. However, the festival of anguished phone calls, crazy people, agitated minds that I managed to stage from a very young age was always lively and vibrant. Like that afternoon of January 5th many years ago when I was so avant-garde I sneaked up on my grandparents' roof to wait for La Befana. Santa Claus, whom the other cousins referred to as drooling, didn’t excite me much. But La Befana did. I knew that my unpredictable action would be followed by an unequal and opposite reaction with a deployment of forces (including law enforcement) that was paranormal. And it amused me.

I had asked my father what democracy meant, and he explained it to me in a "Rodarian" manner, so much so that he immediately inoculated me with the concept and functioning of it. Near that chimney, I thought it was a failing system because it gave the opportunity to have one's ideas represented by people as crazy as all those looking for me. In his heart, my father knew that in the end, there would be something to laugh about. But he looked for me. Above all, to know what I had thought during that time. And I had thought that one day I would play my grandfather’s violin. That I would lead the town band. That I could become like my father and have a son like me. I liked myself but was not a narcissist. I knew I had to improve.

When I found myself cleaning the chimney a while ago, and thus climbing onto the roof of the house, I discovered that the world of tiles is beautiful because you’re up there, the others are below, and since they sent you up there, they surely neither want to, nor have the strength or balance to reach you there. In that slippery place (still less than the everyday parterre) where everything calms down and where you discover that whoever needs to tell you something must look from below to above, enunciating the words clearly, with a moderately loud voice. The beehive is not a problem. Nor are the bees. They are surprised and some take guard while others go sucking down below. But it ends there. Being a chimney sweep is fun but tiring. When you see yourself in the glass of the sooty hatchway, you think about how unseeable you would have been with black skin. The one John Coltrane deserved to have.

Classical like a Double V-Neck guitar in a symphony orchestra, his psychotropic enhanced sax sounded in my head and made me think of the democracy that allowed someone to insult him without saying a word, in the cover scrutiny phase of LPs in any record store. A conservative cannot reach it due to political deformation. Just as it's not obvious that a progressive can understand his personal revolt. I am neither conservative nor progressive. I am for the (un)healthy analog anachronism and when I think of something political, I rewind the tape reviewing everything that might have happened in the meantime. To get to John Coltrane I also had to rewind '68 but no one will ever convince me that he cultivated the best flowers. When I was up there, I thought about these things that can be more incisive than the description of a record by octaves. Perhaps he should have been the first black president of the United States of America. He who deconstructed the Disneyesque goodness of "chimney sweep" and rebuilt it without neoclassical balances, condemning the forms of a Love and Psyche to be the initiation of weak man to the mass of paranoia. Riotous and psychiatric. Almost an invitation to look inside yourself and agonize over something more than not being able to make it to the end of the month, being seen as inferior beings, of feeling part of a single multitude with fixed and industrial working hours. Maybe John was preparing the guillotine for the causes of man's evils. Or, perhaps, simply his own.

Free like a musician who does not act on set scores, Coltrane does what he wants with others' sensitivities, capturing the listener and laying him on the analyst's couch only to abandon him to his conclusions. First, he helps you scrape the bottom of your defeated dignity, then he leaves you alone. And it’s not malice. It's a way to learn to grow and become like your father and have a son like yourself. It's the overture of a bumpy inner journey full of distant clangors that, if you have chosen the right path, you will recognize to be his music only after a long time. Whether I place it in parallel or in meridian compared to my life, John Coltrane is always counterclockwise. Nervous, impulsive, frenetically sweaty too. Like a good musician, blacksmith, politician should be at the end of each day.

For me, it's a five. For the experts, I don't know, but it will surely be 1965. The year it came out.