Everyday Magic Anywhere

Aaaahhhhh. Yessss. I am here. Reflected. Fuzzy. Tokyo.

Well, to be specific, this picture was taken tonight in Chiba before playlng at a jazz club called Candi.

First concert with a trio I imagined together with Takashi Seo on bass and Fumi Endo on piano.

It delivered. It was unpredictable. Unprecedented. Beautiful. Wild. On the edge of a cliff, staring at the stars, while pulled in by the vortex of our creative entangled consciousnesseseses.

Needless to say it left me exhausted afterwards. Nothing a late night ramen can’t fix.

Japanese know how to do a living.

No doubt about that.

Before the concert, right before and right after this picture was taken I walked towards a 7-11 to get a small onigiri and a cold green tea.

And I noticed my body ever so naturally taking the slowest pace I can make, without it becoming like this other thing.

No, this was natural . Yet a pace, a rhythm my body only knows how to stepfall into when I am in Japan.

And that pace, I realised, was going to be the pace underneath the flow of our playing.

And somehow it was.

And somehow it wasn’t.

But mostly it was.

And sometimes all I could do was being mindless amidst the mindfullness of the dedicated listeners.

Wow, Japanese audiences, they sure do know how to listen.

Deeply. Invested. Consumed. Moved. Inhabited.

After the concert Fumi and I took the metro back into Tokyo, sharing by means of google translate our deepest thoughts and sentiments about playing music the way we did.

That holding of your hands as if a cup in front of you, holding the music space, wherein one hand holds the sense of it, the other hand the nonsense. Or one hand says IT IS, while the other says IT ISN’T.

Music doesn’t need to be good.

Music just wants to be real.

And realness means it speaks of our deepest existential nature, one that we share, yet in the sense of it all, it means nothing.

Which is not always the most comforting of experiences. On the contrary. It can be utterly unsettling, putting us in touch with the void, a touch with the sublime.

Other days the winds are calmer, the fragrances they carry sweeter, euphoria its language.