How did you live through 2020? What are your hopes for 2021? / In response to Jazz Magazine2021-02-01
Spring 2020. Beyond the astonishment for all, and deep pain for some, there was also new food for thought, which in particular took at their word those who, like me, had been happy to consider slowness as a source of freedom until then.
However, this constrained slowness had some curious hues: hues of ancestral anguish, of imminent threat, of an even more radical re-examination of the question of limits... and inevitably those of the relaunched noise of the digital world, which was frantically taking over from the usual urban noise. This noise was quick to pour out its floods of certainties, some to deny the reality of the threat, some to point the finger of blame, some to transform physical immobility into digital opportunity, with the moving image continuing to undermine reason and, incidentally, music.
It was probably all this that had to be resisted, whatever the cost.
The only certainties I felt at this stage were to protect those close to me, to maintain links with family, friends, music and educational community… and, really, to find the energy to keep in touch with my piano.A few months later, in the midst of a second oxymoronic pause (less constraining, harder to live with), at the dawn of a few perspectives finally opened up by the marriage of science and capital, we find ourselves once again hoping for (at least a little) more virtuous globalization, a digital agora (at least a little) more open to the principle of uncertainty, and music that distinguishes itself (at least a little) from noise, concept and image.
To hope is certainly also to try to contribute.
But it's bad weather all the same...