Jazz!!! For a long time i had been looking for some cd with music by Tete Montoliu, a well-known Catalan jazz musician (Barcelona 1933-1997), especially since i knew he played Jazz on piano (i prefer jazz played on piano). And this week i managed to borrow some CD from the local library and right now i'm listening to it (i had to wait for a moment to play it at my PC, since all CD players we have at home appear to be still dead). Today i looked for some information on his life and works on the net. It was nice to read that jazz, a music style closely linked to freedom, could find talented people and develop lively, but timidly seing the music scene as a whole, in the kind of Spain we had in the 50es and 60es, with Franco ruling the country, the early stages of the tourist boom, spanish pop music of that time...
What a wonderful thing! naughty musical notes, full of colours dancing across all imaginable spaces, reaching every nook and corner of one's mood (yes, i believe it has corners....the mood could be dimensional)..filling them up with some energy, and colourful dancing shapes, just like the visualisations in windows media player or musicmatch :) It's the same feeling i got when i started listening carefully to all songs i found by Thelonious Monk, although his style is different (Most of Monk's compositions belonged to bebop style within jazz). It's a pity i didn't find his music before...It'd have been really great if, in the 90es, when he was still alive, i could have heard him in some concert. But the fact is that i wasn't really into jazz at that time. Musical taste is always evolving and we become more demanding as we grow older. Jazz came to my life relatively late, a couple of years ago, i'd say, but it's remained by my side, staying closely to me, becoming a part of several memories and a tool to change things in life, to make moments different. And knowing some friends (too few) who love that style, and thus being able to share this interest it keeps very alive and i could get to know more jazz musicians (hey! thanks again Arief for the info on Indonesian jazz musicians!). It's really a pity that we reach some things maybe-too-late, but it's indeed better, when things seem to arrive at the moment when we'd likely enjoy and appreciate them better. Actually it doesn't happen always...but as years go by we learn to appreciate things we come across along our path.
Going back to Thelonious Monk, it's rather curious, that i got to know him thanks to a not-so-famous German movie i watched in July 2004, as one of the activities in the German course i was taking. The movie, "nach fünf im Urwald" (1995) wasn't especially interesting, but one of the "characters" was an old vinyl record of Thelonious Monk. Curiosity made the rest...i looked for information on that musician and got some cd by him. We shouldn't underestimate any kind of movie.
Then i went on (and still go on) looking for some other jazz pianists...and the one i can't find anything from is Takehiro Honda...But it's a matter of having patience, searching and moving forward...and having luck; just how life seems to work.
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