Jean Kapsa

I left the city at 1am. The radio was blaring news about relations between the United States and Russia. I left the station on long enough to find my way to the freeway. A matter of a few minutes no doubt, then it would be straight on for an hour and a half. Still a little lively, the streets were dotted with passers-by finishing their conversations before heading home, then quickly the sidewalks disappeared to make way for wider asphalt. Finally, I changed the radio, choosing according to the program and the quality of reception. A loop between a jazz standard, a political debate in rerun, a program on a traditional Japanese instrument, and an analysis of silence in baroque music. My mix was nothing to be proud of, but it was enough to keep me awake at a late hour. I was almost alone on this freeway which is a major route to the south. Truck headlights were the last remnants of a sleeping civilization and radio broadcasts reminiscent of a world gone by. There was something soothing about driving that night.

I enter the waiting room. The smell of hot cigarettes gets to me. With the door open, I stand still and hesitate to turn around and wait outside, but I decide to stay. Serves me right for always being early. I slowly enter this small, plain room with its light, sober walls. Two people are already waiting, one on a sofa and the other sitting at a round table, a cane resting on the table next to the magazines. I choose to sit at the table, opposite the man with the cane. It briefly gives me the impression that dinner is about to be served, but it’s neither the time nor the place. I wonder which of these two people has dared to smoke in this place, but neither has a cigarette pack or ashtray in front of them. So I give up this vain reflection, and my foggy thoughts evaporate at the same time as my eye is drawn to the “No Smoking Zone” sign, ironically hung on the wall. Strange to have to point it out, I thought, but probably necessary. After a few smoky breaths, I catch sight of Monet’s painting Le pont d’Argenteuil. In the end, this wall isn’t so empty - all I needed was a clearer view.

Worked a bit on Keith Jarrett’ Memories of Tomorrow today on the piano, a tune I’ve already played several times in the past. This is actually the last piece of the Köln Concert, originally named Köln, January 24, 1975 Part IIc. This time I tried different things for the left hand, first in the low register with open chords and a rather supple rhythmic pattern, then in the medium register with tight chords and a syncopated, repetitive rhythmic pattern. At the end of the piece, I naturally improvised a coda by repeating two chords in a loop, the second changing from time to time, then returning to the original. The right hand developed into a melody that I was happy with, played first in unison between the medium and low notes, then in more orchestral chords, while the left hand continued its rhythm. I’ve recorded these ideas and I’m thinking of reworking and integrating them for a future concert. It’s a good example of how working on an inspiring piece can lead to a flow of ideas.

I met the Atipik crew last october on La Canebière avenue in Marseille while I was storing my music equipment after a show, and now I’m happy to be part of Le Chant des Oiseaux next edition that will take place mid-June in France. Registrations are open for a limited number of tickets. If you plan to come, let me know.

Almost twenty years ago, I was a music student in a jazz school near Paris. For the piano class, there were four of us pianists taking lessons at the same time around the piano, so each student could observe what the other was doing during the exercises, and then we’d often share our ideas. It just so happened that diminished chords featured from time to time in our studies and discussions. Their particular construction made them a little more perilous than other chords, and we regularly wondered how best to deal with their presence in a piece, both for the voicings and for improvising.

At the time, I was regularly having fun creating systems of thought, some of them to get me off the beaten track of jazz harmony, to improvise and accompany differently. What we call playing out of the harmony. So one day I decided to replace all diminished chords with lydian chords, without worrying about harmonic meaning or a possible problem with the underlying melody. And for instance a D diminished chord would become a lydian D chord, played as a D major triad in the left hand and an E major triad in the right. In this specific case, most of the time, to my surprise, this worked quite well by ear, as on Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered for example. Call it a risky reharmonization, or a trial and error game.

This is just one of many examples of experimentation that have enabled me to get out of my comfort zone, and little by little, to break down the barriers of my piano playing and improvisation to realize that it’s possible to play almost anything, it really depends on the chemistry between a number of ingredients - intention, listening, timing, rhythm, sound - all of which needing to be handled and developed with care (or not) and choices made. And if I played a wrong note, there was a very high probability that the right one was the key right next to it (another fun and risky assertion to play with), so I could adjust on the spot. I could almost caricature it by saying that the choice of notes is no longer important, but I guess the melody simply becomes a pretext and a context for making music. It implicitly directs all the other factors, like a quiet conductor with a strong direction.

Regularly, my colleagues and teachers, interested in what they had just heard, would ask me what had just happened, and I explained that I’d made an empirical choice. They were perplexed. In the end, in the midst of other study subjects, it was a fun creative way of avoiding boredom, surprising myself and the audience. I think it’s a tactile and psychological approach to the instrument that eventually became unconscious and organic, helping develop a certain vocabulary.

A few weeks ago, while sitting on a train to Paris, I stumbled across writer Flore Vasseur. I’d just read her book What Remains Of Our Dreams on the life of Aaron Swartz, an American internet activist, my age, whose inspiring journey I knew from following his writings in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and whose death had left a deep impression on me. In her book, Flore Vasseur recounts her important and delicate meeting with Larry Lessig, Swartz’s mentor, on a train in south-east France heading for Paris. That’s just where we were.

Recognizing her, I thought back to that chapter and scene, and set off to shyly stammer a few words of thanks for her book. As I listened to her talk about her future projects, I also thought about her meeting with Edward Snowden. I would have liked to go into more detail with her on these subjects, but I moved a few seats away. Sitting in my seat, as the scenery unfolded, I kept thinking about her book, the activists she highlights, and more technical things linked to the subjects Swartz had worked on, such as the RSS format and the Markdown syntax, which I use to publish on this website via Blot.

In the light of this chance encounter, I also wondered about the way someone can decide to commit their efforts and militate in a certain direction according to their background and values, this commitment being transformed into a book, a film, a photo, a painting, a piece of music.

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