Andrea Serdio
Mexico City / 10.05.2025 01:44:00
Jazz portraits (Tusquets, 2025) is a book to look, read and listen. In it the work of the Japanese painter coincides Makoto Wada and that of his compatriot, permanent candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Haruki Murakamiboth lovers of syncopated music.
Based on the portraits made by Wada for two exhibitions: one in 1992 and one in 1997, plus one bonus track which includes a Frank Sinatra, Art Pepper y Gil Evansthe author of Tokio Blues Write paths in which he makes clear his knowledge and passion for a genre that was born in the nineteenth century in the southern United States, which in the 20th traveled to Chicago, to New York, to the entire world creating a history, a culture, a way of composing, listening and interpreting that radically free music.
There are fifty -five portraits on which Murakami weaves remembrance, makes suggestions, outlines times, outlines anecdotes and elaborates a soundtrack that can be consulted at the end of the book; They are short texts that he writes after listening to the jazz legends on vinyl records, collected throughout his life, which turn in the Tornameesa and whose sounds escape powerful for two years and disparate speakers. It is an experience full of magic that you want to share, that’s why it says in the preface: “Nothing […] I would make me as happy as making the reader feel part of the pleasure that I experience when the toadiscos is launched, the needle of this falls on one of my old jazz elepés and, comfortably rightened in my armchair, I hear the music that spreads in the air, in the heat of my burrow. ”Wada, by the way, also enjoys jazz in his vinyl records.
-The book begins with the trumpeter and singer Chet Baker (1929-1988). “Nothing like its pure sound and without artifice to exorcise the pain housed in us; and no one like him, with his gift, to make it possible,” writes Murakami who continues his relationship with Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday (“The swing world danced with her and even the earth shuddered to their son”), Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis… And today forgotten artists as the cornetist Bix Beiderbeckefrom which he knew when he worked at Jazz-Café Swing in the early sixties: “He was an ephemeral star [en los años veinte del pasado siglo]a self -destructive drinker and the white genius of his instrument, ”says Murakami.
On the payroll Jazz portraits They are also Count Basie, Anita O’Day, Herbie Hancock And so many extraordinary characters more portrayed by Makoto Wada in a collection scattered throughout the world and that it has only been possible to gather in this book, in which the images inspired the writing of Murakami.
According to the writer of Men without women: “Since jazz seduced me and entered my life, it has not ceased to be a substantial part of it. Music, in general terms, has always been important for me, but jazz, in particular, occupies a special place. In addition, for a while, my work [como administrador del club de jazz Peter Cat] He was closely related to him. ”
For those who do not have the great collection of Murakami jazz album Diego Gándara in The worldIt is “a musical and vital experience.”
AQ
