A cloud of black birds

En la web de Cuadernos de Jazz han colgado una entrevista que le hice hace ya un tiempo al guitarrista Joe Morris.

http://www.cuadernosdejazz.com/component/content/article/2269.html

En ella, Morris habló un poco de su adolescencia, y al hilo de esto yo mencionaba el texto que él mismo había escrito para su disco A cloud of black birds. Es un texto que siempre me ha gustado mucho, y que incluso en el momento en que se publicó originalmente la entrevista, en 2007 y en la edición impresa de la revista, pense en añadirlo al artículo. No lo hice entonces, pero voy a hacerlo ahora, añadiendo antes el tema homónimo del mismo disco.

"In 1969, when I was 14 years old, after four or five years of being an angry, depressed, generally confused kid and a habitual truant, I was sent to a school for troubled children run by the State of Connecticut. I lived there for about six months and finished out the school year commuting from my home. The first couple of weeks there were scary. I was away from home and didn't know what my future would be. So I spent as much time as I could alone in my room looking out the window and thinking about the fact that I had hit bottom already in my short life.

"My room looked out over a meadow to the tree-lined edge and the woods beyond. This was in the month of October. The leaves were changing colors and the wind was blowing hard. Every afternoon I watched large flocks of cross-migarting starlings fly from one side of the field to the other and from tree to tree. Their collective movement was held together by a loud and seemingly chaotic sense of order. Watching those birds quickly changed my focus from myself and my predicament to a kind of amazed contemplation at the natural beauty and mystery of that scene. The image has stayed in my head ever since. I'm sure that experiencing it helped me to grow and understand myself better.

"During the winter of 1969, on a home visit, I learned to play my first chords on a friend's guitar. Learning about music and attempting to create music over the years has given me the same sense of contemplation and understanding of my personal growth as I had watching the black birds. All of the musicians who have inspired me remind me of the birds in their ability to create an elemental kind of beauty by showing order where others find chaos. My own expression is an attempt to be like that and hopefully to inspire someone to pause and think about their time in this worls."

Joe Morris. August 1998.

Joe Morris nació en 1955.
El disco A cloud of black birds fue publicado en 1998 por el sello AUM Fidelity.
El cuarteto lo integraban Morris a la guitarra, Mat Maneri al violín, Chris Lightcap al contrabajo, y Jerome Deupree a la batería.