Years ago I was told of someone who had had a horrible nightmare. He dreamed that he was awake while everyone else was asleep; then he dreamed that he fell asleep while everyone else woke up. But the worst would not be that, but what would come later. Already in a waking state, he couldn’t help but wonder what he had been trying to tell himself while all this was happening. Sometimes dreams are like a swarm of bees that you have to chase away from your brain. In others, a door that opens and shows you paradise. One night Jorge Pardo had one of these. As he had lived so many times in the real world, the musician went on tour again with Paco de Lucía’s Sextet. He got on the plane and the guitarist from Algeciras was waiting for him in the seat next to him. But there was something strange about this airship, so unlike any he had ever seen before, that it secretly unsettled him. How odd!
“Paco, where are we going to play?”
“Ah, but they haven’t told you? To the moon”.
Jorge Pardo, 65 years old, with a long white braid and laughing eyes, tells it at the beginning of Trance . A documentary film by Emilio Belmonte that for two years follows the immense jazz flutist and saxophonist around the world who found in flamenco a zone of magic and possibility. A bubbling space where you can imagine other ways of being. Ideas and people are always welcome in the sound of a musician who one day dreamed of buying a ticket to the Moon and came back with an aesthetic revolution. In the film, at times of dizzying beauty, there is laughter, revelry and compadreo in dressing rooms and bars, applause and truth on stage, collaborations between strangers who get married joyfully (Ambi Subramaniam, Chick Corea, Diego Carrasco, Tomás de Perrate, Diego del Morao, Ana Morales, Carles Benavent, Tino di Geraldo…), spontaneous dances in the street with children from the Sevillian neighborhood of Tres Mil Viviendas, moments of solitude and boredom in hotels, reproaches from a son whose absences still take their toll and the feeling of defeat of a girlfriend tired of being stood up every weekend without further explanation. “I would ask you for a little complicity, because if not, don’t have a relationship. It’s okay, man. It can’t be… ”, he is heard in the message he leaves on the voice mail. Robert Filliou already said it, “art is what makes life more interesting than art”, although sometimes everyday truths, like musical notes, are necessarily slippery. But above all, there is the encouraging determination of a man who decided to get off the beaten track in order to “continue to rent my freedom and give the best of myself.” It’s not little. His are some of the most beautiful pieces that Spanish music has given in the last forty years. I can only applaud. And wish that he continues to play on the Moon.
4
