Autumn enters, like a presentiment; The leaves fall on the rain and I start thinking about how beautiful sadness is when it is accompanied by the music of Chet Baker. Sometimes I have those things while the last cigarette is consumed by the assault of memories and I listen autumn leaves, the song that Chet Baker recorded with Ruth Young, his girlfriend, before heroin separated them, slowly, without making a sound, like a worn cloth that tears where it hurts most.
It is the melody of the musician who plays for the price of his vices and who lets himself be carried like a derailed train onto a siding. There is a certain tendency toward defeat in the fall, a slow, twilight season that is matched only by a jazz song like this. My sentimental memory is triggered every time I hear Chet Baker’s slurred voice sing the first notes. So, I go out into the rain again wrapped in a mood that is as literary as it is urgent, and I look for someone to sell me an ounce of happiness to continue writing these and other things while I hum the bitter taste of the song that today brings me to here.
The first time I heard Autumn Leaves It was in the living room of my house, which we called the “living room,” and it was on a Yves Montand record that my father was playing when he was counting the leaves that fell behind the rain-spattered glass, and the sadness appeared in his eyes. hallucinated loneliness that later ended his life. Les Feuilles Mortes.
I then wanted to be like Scott Fitzgerald, a beautiful and damned writer capable of transferring the deepest sensations to the surface of a burning paper. There is a lot of Fitzgerald in Baker and a lot of Baker in Fitzgerald, as if the exquisite prose of the Great Gatsby preceded the suicidal and stupefying melody of the man who played the trumpet with the abandoned liturgy that brings a heroin rush.
Both died beyond their means, one without finding his name in bookstores; the other, charging less than he paid for his vices, leaving the sound of saliva and crying stuck, like a scab, to the edge of his trumpet. Anyone who passes some subjects can be a civil engineer, lawyer or political scientist. For a journalist you still need less than that. On the contrary, not everyone can write like Fitzgerald or play the trumpet like Baker, two artists as similar as they are equal, always on the verge of being swallowed by the abyss of their own destruction. In the end they got it.
When I return home smoked and my steps slip on the autumn leaves, the ghosts come out to my path and cross my path to the rhythm of Autumn Leaves; a song that can be improvised; a beautiful love song that makes death stop being eternal.
#Autumn #Leaves
