Over the top

Masood Hasan


Only a handful of people listen to jazz and even less actually savour it. Most have no clue what this music is and can wander through life without ever having been burdened with even a note or appreciating this unique music art form, born out of slavery that came from the world’s greatest continent, Africa to America. Here it was nurtured, developed and refined through many years by men and women who took this tribal means of communication and fashioned it with Europe’s classical heritage, Africa and Latin America’s exotic and heady rhythms and other flavours from all over the world.
The great thing about jazz then and jazz now is the music’s ability to embrace and absorb so many different streams to form this great river of human expression and emotion. Jazz has no screaming, hair-tearing mob following. It never did, it never will. But in spite of everything dismissive said about it, jazz has endured and in the process become richer.
So why talk about it when the dead are barely buried here in Pakistan and an entire nation, already at the crossroads of despair, stands at yet another crossroads of gloom and uncertainty? Why, indeed, when, wherever you go, whoever you talk to speaks in circles. And no one is able to point out a single direction that can lead us away from these forests, on fires stoked by hatred, intolerance, anger, fear, hypocrisy and twisted theories. A nation which was has never been clear where it came from or why and, worse, where it is headed, has been lashed and mutilated so much that the ensuing portrait evokes the famous line of Apocalypse Now, when Col Kurtz looks around the chaos and says, “The horror, the horror of it all.”
Those of us who were sometimes able to get out of Pakistan would be accosted by people from other countries and cultures who would look at us and say, “Aren’t you the people who hanged your prime minister?” and we didn’t know where to look. Mercifully, most didn’t know that we had also assassinated another prime minister at a public meeting, the killer conveniently killed post haste and the mystery never resolved. We were the same people who had their president, despicable angel of death as he was, blown into smithereens on a hot and humid August afternoon in Bahalwapur. And then, in 2007, we killed the charismatic daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, assassinated at the same garden where a prime minister had been shot 56 years before.
As is the hallowed tradition, nothing is known about who planned or executed this or the many other crimes. In between, this nation lost half the country, some heaving a sigh of great relief, others cheering and celebrating. The 90,000 prisoners of war who had been fighting their own people went were brought back, thanks to Bhutto’s skilful negotiations from a very weak position, and repaid the country with more martial laws and more misery. Now we have murdered our governor, with a large section of this confounded nation rejoicing as if we have found heaven on earth.
In between, before and after, the killings continue, the culprits never arrested or, God forbid, brought to justice. The blood of Pakistanis flows on and on and people sit in drawing rooms and theorise – those who have drawing rooms, that is. For most, there is nothing after six decades of “freedom.” Buffeted by prices of daily living now far beyond their measly income, denied power, gas, water, sanitation, rule of law, respect, dignity, fair play and abandoned repeatedly by a people’s rule that has neither people or rules, this is a country with a morbid death wish.
It also makes Pakistan one of the planet’s most corrupt nations, and yet, every day the media has nothing to report but more graft, more money illicitly changing hands and a yawning chasm between who we profess to be and who we actually are. In all this, the armed forces look on with many saying the time is right for yet another takeover. This surely is the winter of our discontent without the glorious promised summer.
So why jazz? Because in the dying moments of 2010, Dr Billy Taylor, the great American jazz pianist, died in New York. So who is Dr Taylor and why must one lament his passing? Many years ago, when Stan Getz, the legendary saxophone player, died at a time when even in ill health he was playing ever so beautifully, I wrote about it. An irate reader – the rumours are true: there are some who actually read this column – wrote to the newspaper and took me apart for writing something which had absolutely no relevance to our lives and about a music that made no difference to us. I find Dr Taylor’s life very relevant because it demonstrates a sustained commitment to a belief and the pursuit of something magical, music in this case, that all of us abandon so quickly and so readily. This is why none of us who have the opportunity are ready to take 30 minutes out of our trivial lives to spend listening to music or reading a book.
All we do is talk. Purposelessly, each theory more amazing and outlandish than the other and almost all of it, banal and forgettable. It is hard not to throw up each time one is served another exotic cocktail of a “grand” plan to dismember Pakistan, with the hands pointing at the Americans, the Chinese, the Jews or the Indians. A country so misguided as ours needs no enemies to push it over the brink. We should at least know that.
Dr Taylor wrote and played melodies that inspired the soul for 50-60 years from his beloved Steinway piano. “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life,” another great jazz master had said, and Dr Taylor believed it. I had the great privilege and honour to have met Dr Taylor when he toured Pakistan in the ‘80s and we maintained a friendship. Years later, when I chanced to be in NY, I hesitatingly called him and he was, as always, gracious and charming. Since I was in New York for just a few days, he cancelled previous appointments and insisted that I dine with him and his wife. Over my protests, he personally collected me and took me home to Riverside Drive, and there we had a memorable evening of jazz and a happy dinner. I recall the awe entering his home and seeing thousands of records and tapes, all catalogued, and being asked what I would like to hear! I said, “Dr Taylor,” and his eyes twinkled. “Really?” he asked, and then played divinely for an hour to an audience of one!
Each one of us has to find our solution to the madness that encompasses us. I and many like me are but flawed guides, but Pakistanis do need to look inside their souls and find what they can still save and nurture. Without this we are all nothing but a faded page of contemporary history that will age rather badly.