Thursday, November 27, 2008

A love supreme

I have been recently in Paris for a short visit and, suddenly, i got a kind of nostalgia for my first stay in this city, as a student, some 25 years ago. It was hard time for me but I learned a lot there. Among other things i discovered music in Paris, the big, the divine one.

My "saints" were Coltrane, Mahler, Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, Bach or Wagner. I wanted to buy all their albums, I remember me sparing money from my food to do this. Records, or the first published cds at this period, were expensive for the average student in the 80's. A not so great edition of Parsifal costed me one week's meals in 1983..

I remember especially the nights I passed in my tiny chambre de bonne, listening for hours Coltrane or Mahler discs, while i was litteraly starving... Most of all, A love supreme, 48 minutes of pure ecstasy (whithout drugs!) in my earphones, listened again and again..

Today, a 20 years-old guy can download this masterpiece from Emusic for 35 cents! He can also search among 100 other Coltrane's albums and out-of-print editions . That means progress to me. The only problem is that, although (or because) the purchase of music is so easy, there is no devotion to the music saints anymore.

Or i am wrong : there must exist out there boys and girls with the same love for the music, the great one..

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

nice post, Birdie! We all went through this..

Gershom, Tel-Aviv