POINCIANA

Poinciana,
Your branches speak to me of love.
Pale moon is casting shadows from above.

He'd played the song tens of thousands of times by now and even Ahmad himself sometimes wondered how the repetition of performing it night after night never once became remotely boring to him.

Any musician who had a single song become synonymous with their entire identity as a performer might feel as if it were a sort of musical curse for them, destined to play the same tune every night to different sets of audiences which came in and out of the clubs, concert halls and festivals like casual tourists admiring the pretty flowers the musicians had helped grow into the culture from seed to bloom.

Even flowers though could lose their charms if you saw the same ones every single day.

Except for Poinciana, Ahmad's eternal flower, the source from which all the light in his life came directly from ever since they first ran into one another when he was a piano player for The Four Strings.

Meeting a timeless song for Ahmad was just like encountering a beautiful woman, and in the case of Poinciana he just knew instantly he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Finding endless variations on her beauty was a privilege and having tried out so many endless permutations with the melody, at the centre of it all was the same sense of wonder he had felt when he first encountered the tune.

And as he grew older through the decades, Poinciana kept him forever young as if at the centre of that hypnotic melody was the secret elixir of life itself, his Dorian Gray portrait in musical form.

Then, towards the end of his life, he came to see his Poinciana less of a standard and more as a hymn and rather than thinking of it what he did to honour the song as performance, he saw it more a form of prayer, one where at the core of it was the divine nature of existence that remained unperturbed by the transitory events of world history unfolding, the deep magic where the soul can finally find peace.

Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air.
To and fro, you sway, my heart's in time

Rest In Peace Ahmad!

Ahmad Jamal (1930-2023)

17th April 2023