FORGOTTEN TREASURE

I've been clearing through tonnes of boxes of music from my seemingly infinite vault lately and feeling like a terrible glutton which always reminds me of that terrifying scene in David Fincher's 'Se7en' (1995) when Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt find some dead guy with his head face down in a bowl of cold spaghetti in some dank, city basement. There are times recently going through all the vulgar amounts of music I've amassed in my life when I've almost envied 'spaghetti guy' for only being a glutton with food and not music. Same difference I guess.

Though as I'm getting deeper into this process of clearing out the more ruthless I'm becoming. Too ruthless maybe. I've heard some Buddhists believe that by a certain age, you should discard all your spiritual books for the wisdom inside them should be so deeply contained within you that you no longer have any need of them. I do wonder if that's true of music? It seems hard to imagine one could remember all the minutiae and multiple layers of the greatest sounds in music inside your own head whenever you choose to remember them. Perhaps if I was some genius musician maybe, but alas when it comes to playing instruments (piano mostly) I'm what is known as a musical bullshitter as in it sounds good to the untrained ear but as soon as a real musician walks in the room they'll sniff out the weakness of my ham-fisted left hand like one of Roald Dahl's 'Witches'.

So now it's between two piles of sorting: 'the needs' and 'the not needs' and with this ruthless streak I've acquired I've had to double check I haven't thrown treasure away that I've idly considered surplus to requirements. This evening, for example, I slung a disc away with near-indecipherable text on the front cover only to find myself getting a gnawing feeling that I should go back and check it wasn't something rare or valuable. Or both.

On closer inspection, it turned out to be a Regina Carter disc 'Rhythms Of The Heart' on Universal and suddenly I was struck by a Proustian moment of remembrance where I remembered seeing her perform at Cheltenham Jazz Festival for Ray Brown's 80th Birthday Concert which just so happened to be the greatest jazz concert (along with Abdullah Ibraham) that I've ever seen.

Putting the disc on and checking the track list I immediately jumped to Track 6 - 'Spring Can Really Hand You Up The Most' and was cast under its spell as the heartfelt tone of Carter's violin had me suspended between the past and the present in a reverie of both re-living precious memories with my father and friend back then at the concert and now, being here alone by myself. This music had traveled through time with me and now we were finally re-acquainted I marveled at its understated genius and felt as if something missing had been returned to me.

Turns out that missing thing was timeless nostalgia and so now I'm extra careful while I'm in the process of clearing out.

Maybe those Buddhists are onto something when it comes to their spiritual books, but music this sublime should never be far from one's reach.