the form of edifying parables about exemplary pupils or cautionary tales about rogues miraculously reformed: nothing was further from the truth. The protagonists may have been exceptional, but they could hardly be called sweet or angelic; the features that made them exceptional did not rank high in any catalogue of student virtues. They were intractable, unruly and insubordinate, occasionally insulting and provocative; they had an inflated sense of their own worth; they exuded boldness and independence. They were headstrong, wilful and proud, and they went their own way. But they all dazzled with their talent – a stupendous memory or a beautiful voice, brilliance or wit or a first-class brain – they all had something extraordinary. It was hard to believe, listening to those stories, that the events described had really taken place, especially since the teachers, in recounting their charges’ outrageous antics, not only failed to allow so much as a note of condemnation to creep into their narratives but, indeed, seemed to find in the retelling, and in the whiff of scandal that often tinged it, a kind of nostalgic relish, even a certain pride, as if fortune had singled them out for a special honour in allowing them to witness something so far removed from the ordinary.
But of course there was a moral. In all these piquant, apparently iconoclastic tales of nonchalant bravado lurked a far less pleasant message. It was a warning, and it went more or less like this: ‘The fact that such things once happened does not mean they will continue to happen. In particular, it does not mean that anything of the sort can be allowed to happen in this class. Those years, those people, were exceptional, unique. Now they’re gone, and nothing about them has anything to do with you. Remember that: don’t even think of trying to emulate them. You’d come to a dismal end.’
This attitude was one with which I was all too familiar, but in this case I could not come to terms with it. Yes, the world was once a richer, more interesting, more vivid place – of that I had no doubt. I was also prepared to believe that musicians, and artists in general, were greater in the past. I could concede, although less willingly, that mountain climbing was once a nobler activity than it is now and that the royal game of chess had masters more worthy of it. But school? Was I really supposed to believe that even pupils were better in the past? No – this idea I could not accept.
It’s just not possible, I thought, that all this greyness and mediocrity around me is irrevocable; it can’t be entirely beyond redemption. After all, the way things are also depends on me: I can influence reality; I, too, can create it. In which case, it’s time to act. Time to launch myself into something. Let something happen: let something start, once again, to happen! Let the old times return, and with them the great heroes, in new incarnations!
The Modern Jazz Quartet
One legend that inspired me in those days was the legend of jazz, especially Polish jazz. Its heroes were teddy boys, daring challengers of the Stalinist morals of the day; the notorious and fascinating writer ‘Leo’ Tyrmand, ‘renegade’ and libertine, indefatigable promoter of jazz as the music of freedom and independence; and the leaders of the first Polish jazz ensembles, with their rich, colourful lives, their often brilliant careers, their trips to the West, even, sometimes, to the mecca itself – the United States of America. This was the world that made up the legend. My head teemed with images of smoke-filled student clubs and cellars, of heady all-night jam sessions, and beyond them, in a Warsaw still in ruins, still not rebuilt, of deserted streets at dawn, when the jazzmen emerged from their underground lairs as if from bomb shelters, deathly tired and strangely sad. There was a magical quality to these visions, an obscure, haunting charm that made me ache to experience something similar.
I didn’t hesitate long. I rounded up some friends who, like me, took music lessons and were competent on some instrument, and persuaded them to form a jazz band. We put together a quartet – piano, trumpet, percussion and double bass – and began to rehearse. We met after classes, in the school gym. Alas, our rehearsals had very little in common with the stuff of my dreams. Instead of intoxicating clouds of cigarette smoke, alcoholic fumes and French perfume, we were wreathed in a sickly fug of adolescent sweat, lingering from the last PE session; instead of the bohemian atmosphere of half-lit, crowded cellars, redolent of decadence, we had the ambience of a dingy gym in the harsh light of early afternoon or the cadaverous glow of the ceiling lights. Rows of ladders fixed to the wall, barred windows and a bare and endless stretch of floor, wobbling in places underfoot because some of the boards had come loose, and ornamented only by a lone leather vaulting-horse – these were our stage and backdrop. Our playing, too, fell short of the artistry of the famous ensembles: we experienced no legendary trances, no Dionysian frenzies, none of that divine fluency and blind improvisatory exhilaration. The most you could say was that we had more or less mastered a skill; we were competent at best.
I told myself not to worry: it was always like that at the beginning; our time would surely come. And to boost my morale I imagined us dazzling the audience at some future concert or school party, bringing them to their knees in admiration, my own brilliant solo greeted with storms of applause and cries of enthusiasm as I, without taking my hands from the keyboard, turned confidently to the audience to nod a nonchalant thanks and in that brief second saw all the school beauties raptly gazing at me with adoring eyes.
After a few months of rehearsing we had a big enough repertoire to play for well over two hours, and decided the time was ripe for our first performance. But here we encountered an unexpected obstacle. It turned out that the idea of a school jazz club, performing on weekends, say, was one the school authorities would not even consider: to permit such a thing would be tantamount, they were convinced, to colluding in the scandalous transformation of a respectable educational institution into a place of entertainment and from there, inevitably, into a den of iniquity. The students, for their part, refused to consider allowing the Modern Jazz Quartet, as we called ourselves, to play at the three annual school dances: at carnival, or the ball held a hundred days before graduation, or the senior prom. Rock’n’roll was by then a star in the ascendant, The Beatles and similar groups were in the early days of their triumph, and this was the only kind of music teenagers wanted to listen and dance to.
Given this state of affairs, our one chance of performing (and even this the school authorities considered a magnanimous concession) was at school ceremonies – stiff, tedious, soulless affairs full of bombast and pompous rhetoric. To agree to such conditions was to accept a compromise that bordered on a betrayal of all our hopes and ambitions – especially since it was stressed that if we chose to accept the offer, we must play in a ‘quiet and cultured manner’: ‘none of those barbaric rhythms’ and ‘none of that foul caterwauling’. Thus we were reduced to providing ‘musical interludes’ at official school functions – which rejoiced, among all of us, in the most dismal reputation.
In the end, our role in these events was more grotesque than ignominious, more farce than defeat. We played what we wanted, but the context was absurd. For instance, ‘Georgia’ came on the heels of a histrionic collective rendition of Mayakovsky’s ‘Left Forward’, and blues followed the recital, in a series of hysterical shrieks, of verses depicting the horrifying plight of workers in America, where, it was confidently stated, ‘each day some unemployed / jump headlong from the bridge / into the Hudson’. The whole thing, in short, was preposterous, and everyone, the audience as well as ourselves, felt this. How, in such conditions, could one even entertain the illusion that one was creating history or participating in momentous events?
Once a small flame of hope did briefly appear. But it flickered for only an instant, and the circumstances were exceptional.
We were indulged with various diversions in those days, and one of the most tedious was the annual festival of school choirs and vocal groups. It always took place, according to the rule, in the school whose group had won the first prize, the notorious Golden Nightingale, the preceding year. To our misfortune, it so happened that this particular year the pathetic trophy had gone to a group from our school – the ludicrous Exotic Trio, whose speciality was Cuban folklore. Their regrettable triumph meant that the task of organising the festival now fell to us. This was a monstrous headache,
