FREE JAZZ

 

I was a 16 or 17 year old lad when I enrolled in the famous "Quarto Jazz School", housed in the former eighth division of the semi-disused psychiatric hospital in Genoa (the raving lunatics one, therefore very suitable for jazz musicians and aspiring ones)

The small rooms where the lessons were held still had the semicircular anti-escape doors and some even anti-self-harm mattresses on the walls; the lessons were held from 7 pm onwards, and it was not uncommon for jam sessions to stay very late (we even spent a night of snowstorm playing an interminable blues that ended at dawn, but that's another story).

The idols of the school were three slightly older saxophonists, Miki Cesareo (who later played with me in the Kairos Quartet), Gigi Provinciali who became a respected cardiologist and the legendary Pantera.

He was a wiry guy with a saturnine face and a goatee beard, a constantly mocking smile on his lips and a soprano sax capable of launching into solos that, in the stiff Coltranean environment of the school, left everyone speechless with their atonal and almost free flavour.

The teachers trembled when Pantera (no one knew his real name) infiltrated the music room, bringing with him a light scent of marijuana and the promise of broken rules and transcendental harmonies; everyone became more attentive and even the few boppers present dared "something more" in their otherwise canonical solos.

Time passes, we lose sight of each other...but, wow, what a surprise, during my first steps in my career as a "pharmaceutical drug dealer" I meet Gigi Provinciali, an established cardiologist but still with a passion for jazz. In less than you can say, a musical reunion was organized with the old students of the school in a place equipped with a piano, drums and bass amp.

While an anatole goes crazy at stratospheric speed, our nostrils smell a light, nostalgic fragrance of weed: the door opened and he enters, Pantera, jacket and tie but the same saturnine face and the same mocking smile on his lips

He takes his trusty soprano sax out of a greasy case and...no, no free, no atonality, he erupts into a bebop solo that will make Charlie Parker cry tears of blood.

At the end of the song, pats on the back, hugs, glasses that fill and empty faster than a Cherokee played by an epileptic Clifford Brown.

But curiosity gnaws at us: where has the atonal iconoclast, the destroyer of harmonies, the wiry little sprite of free jazz gone?

Finally Provinciali finds the courage and asks him: "Tell me Pantera, but how come you don't play free anymore?"

And the wretch replied: "In fact I didn't play free, it's just that I didn't know that saxophones are transposing instruments and I simply played in the wrong key!"