Jazz Time

                Jazz Time

                Alexandr Piatkov


In a quiet Trans-Ural town, right where the forests yield to the steppes, I

listened to jazz at the turn of the freezing fifties and the thawing sixties.

The sounds drifted out from behind a wicker fence, which doubled as the

wall of a sod-roofed shed.


My neighbor, Kolya Sukhodubov, was playing the clarinet. His soft, subtle

step on thick rubber soles and his drainpipe trousers were in perfect

harmony with the music.


How this lifestyle managed to seep into the very heart of a strictly guarded

communist continent is beyond me. But the town had a radio factory, and

our local airwaves were flooded with amateur radio stations—illegal ones,

naturally.


They were called sharmankas—hurdy-gurdies—and their owners, the hurdy-

gurdy men. When tape recorders finally arrived, jazz time truly blossomed

in that little town on the Ishim River.


Whether jazz itself was to blame, as the old Soviet proverb goes, after the

geopolitical floods of the nineties, the Monday morning silence of a dusty

Crimean marketplace is regularly shattered by the theme song of "Jazz

Time" broadcasting all the way from a city on the Seine.


 
Workers and vacationers alike—who happen to be my customers—greet the

music with absolute delight. For a fleeting moment, the harmony through

which the Creator reveals His presence in the world immerses the frayed

souls of hurrying passersby into a baptismal font of grace-filled vibrations,

straightening the bowed and uplifting the fallen. Perhaps this could be

called a resurrection—or, at the very least, it brings hope.



 © Copyright: Александр Пятков, 2013

Свидетельство о публикации №213043001458