Keith Jarrett
Arbour Zena

October 1975. My father's hand, wool gloves wet from dirty snow.

-The garage needs fixing. Change the belt and then… –

The care taken in leafing through old vinyls, as if following old habits. Family obligations, respecting the elders, finally, the unexpected and unanticipated reward: the system works. Jubilation of music beginning to spin on the turntable.

Pioneer. We are pioneers too, I see he smiles.

-Watch where you step, wait. I'll give you more light. -

Then, special attention in putting heavy stacks of records higher up, placing tapes on the floor, rewinding the tape with pencils, returning to the beginning of the album, the start of the best season, the one you wait an entire year for, a whole lifetime beyond the school bell.

Summer returns. And with it, friends sunburned from anonymous shores. Someone is still out on the road, will never return.

The apartment building is scorching concrete, little space to breathe. Only insistent music on the strings, the echo of a broken Bösendorfer, but perhaps it's not that. No, Keith, it was another record.

-Here, if anything, it's the collaboration with Garbarek's sax that works, you see? It's special. Let's keep it on all night, I want to see the dawn–

The province of Ferrara, the late empire had its own aurora borealis. The Nordic brightness of those notes seemed almost out of a painting by my father or the cover of Arbour Zena, as Manfred Eicher would have wanted, if he too had been any officer of the Italian Commercial Bank painting cold landscapes in his spare time in shades of blue.

Somewhere there should be a special edition of this record. But I searched in the garage. I couldn't find it anymore. Like so many other things of the sense that passes. Like the architectures of arrangements fading on Mirrors, not wanting to disturb anyone. They all played at a minimum. Jarrett must have thought that my mother was sleeping upstairs and it wasn't the time to wake her up yet. After all, I was already thinking about it.

The fan spins at maximum, then turns off. It's dusty in the frame. It has been there on the shelf hidden for 45 years, now. The hand of snow getting closer to the turntable, never reaching it, never turning it off. A slide, a freeze frame. I look at the road, now grown up, the shades of blue. As always, I sketch something intellectual, like:

-Yeah, he forever changed the concept of melodic improvisation–

But what do you care about? You who sleep here next to me, my mother, my father who knows where, they're sleeping too. The whole damned city sleeps. But why is everyone always sleeping? Don't you see. Don't you see? Don't you hear? You shake for a moment. The pulsation of Solara March is irresistible, you caress me and fall back asleep. Here we go again. Maybe you don't understand modal improvisation lent to melody, maybe not. The obsessive genius of Jarrett. But who cares. I love you always, forever. What does Jarrett matter? Meanwhile, my orchestra has fused with the piano and the last needle I had is meeting the same fate. Like many of us, it could have lived longer, but it never was so.

I'm sorry, this record is over and I don't know how to review it.

I apologize to everyone for the time we have lost and will never return.