While watching the Wallabies hammer the British Lions in the torrential rain of Sydney in the final test of the tour Down Under, my friend and genial host Tim told me about some American billionaire nutcase (or shrewd influencer, depending on your perspective) who has developed a health algorithm or protocol called ‘The Blueprint’. My pal suggested that this guy spends about a million dollars each year on supplements, fads, lab reports and other paraphernalia to promote longevity. I asked Tim how old this guy was, expecting him to answer that he was in his 80s, someone experimenting with prolonging his life beyond its usual expectancy. But no, this is someone in his middle age. How I laughed! Doesn’t the deluded sap know that life’s a lottery? He could be killed on his way to the gym, the spa or the laboratory.
Life’s a lottery… and sometimes you win. When we were younger and more anxious to curry favour with the locals of the Corrèze, we learnt not to enter raffles, not because we had no chance of success, but because the prize more often than not might be a side of pork or a litre of walnut wine, neither of which enticed a pair of abstemious vegetarians. I rarely enter competitions, but a month or so ago I went in for one sponsored by the Anglophone newspaper, The Connexion, to win tickets to the Marciac jazz festival. It involved a brief paragraph to say why you wanted to go. Since I’ve learnt the discipline of writing brief music reviews for Songlines magazine, and since jazz is one of my life-enhancing supplements, I felt I might have a chance of winning. Sure enough…
After due consultation with the Good Wife, I nominated an evening with the Christian Sands trio and the Wynton Marsalis sextet. Which necessitated a trip down south-west to the Gers on the last Monday of July. It was our first visit to this annual festival in a sleepy little town in a sleepy little department, which has become as big an affair as Nice, Vienne or Aix-en-Provence. Why on earth hadn’t we been before? I suppose summer’s a busy time here and some aspect of life usually gets in the way. But on the journey, we both discovered the principal reason why: it’s a hell of a long way. When you try to travel cross-country in France, map distances double. Leaving the motorway at Montauban, the route nationale to Auch (pronounced ‘Osh’, I discovered) turned into the kind of grind that persuaded us many years ago to pay autoroute tolls once our family income had stabilised.
We stayed just outside the little town, already buzzing when we passed through it mid-afternoon after four fairly frustrating hours on the road. As well as a dog-sitting facility at a not-negligible €7 per hour, our lodgings offered a view across the rolling countryside from our bedroom under the roof decorated with souvenirs of Niger. The distant mountains were invisible in the heat haze, but in Spring, it seems, the snow-capped backdrop of the Pyrenees turns it into something sublime.
The next day, we shared a communal al fresco breakfast with two other couples also there for the concerts. The young couple had driven up from Valencia, a young Spanish trumpeter (who told me in broken English about the problems of embouchure) and his partner, a Cuban pianist. The older couple were from the Bordeaux area: Madame, a charming cultured woman, perhaps a former teacher, who spoke excellent English, and her husband, a former trumpeter with a bandas marching band, who’d lost his embouchure with the advancing years.
We compared notes – about the ambience and the music itself. After a veggie burger and chips in the designated food-truck area (or ‘Les Foux Treux’ I misheard it mystifyingly) accompanied by a band of teenagers playing 1950s hard bop, the Dame and I took a stroll around the town square, with live music emanating from every bar and every brasserie. The menu du soir took place in a big Big Top big enough to seat around six thousand. At 9pm on the dot, the Christian Sands trio delivered the entrée. A personable young pianist, he played to my mind with the style and panache of a young Herbie Hancock. The main course soon after 11pm was Wynton Marsalis, looking a little pudgy around the jowls these days, with younger brother Jason on drums, his long-time bass and piano players, and two young saxophonists who looked slightly in awe of the legendary company.
Things have changed since either of us last went to such a similarly big concert. (For Debs, it was probably David Bowie at the Stafford cattle market back in the late ‘70s; for me, it was possibly Kid Creole & the Coconuts in the mid ‘80s at the Brighton Conference Centre.) For one thing, the sound was extraordinary – like listening, comfortably, on a humungous home hi-fi. For another, the big screens either side of the stage added a new dimension. I didn’t get it previously: why go to some mega-show where the artists are so far away that they’re dots on a distant stage, so you spend your time watching them on a screen? You could be tucked up in the comfort of your own sitting room watching on YouTube. But I was wrong; terribly wrong.
Under the gaze of our solicitous hostess, keen to know that her guests, French, Spanish and English, could communicate and enjoy her homemade peach and butternut squash jam, we gave our marks. The Dame, the teacher and the Cuban pianist enjoyed Christian Sands and his young rhythm section for their youthful enthusiasm and their sheer brio, while Marsalis and co. seemed tired and world-weary. Yes, the trumpeter was perhaps tired to be up late at his age, but I argued that he’s serious because his music is demanding and he’s self-conscious about his place in the pantheon of jazz. Although he launched straight into the long, intricate ‘Integrity Suite’ with only an aside that there’s little of it about these days, Wynton is no Van Morrison, who truly deserves the epithet of ‘little fat miserable turd’. Debs enjoyed the encore most, when he invited some guest stars onto the stage and played with a real joie de vivre, but I was enthralled throughout the main show by the ensemble playing and the individual solos and how everything slotted together so fluently with barely a note dropped or out of place.
Before hitting the long and winding road for home after breakfast, we were treated to an encore by the Cuban pianist on our hostess’ baby grand. Her entrancing performance underlined how the Cuban state conservatory produces some of the best musicians in the world – only to lose them when they go off to seek fame and fortune. Our hostess also came up with an unbeatable deal on our way out: book with her for the next three consecutive years and earn a (gasp!) 10% discount. It might be a tad controversial to suggest this, but based on our 30 years’ experience the French are not always the most generous of people – unless there’s food and drink involved.
The journey home was even longer and more tortuous than we had figured. We went via Villeneuve-sur-Lot to visit new friends who have bought a ruin just south of the town. He’s an Oxford don, a charming softly-spoken Scotsman with, I surmised, as limited practical nous as my own and a similar impulse to spend his remaining years reading books in a comfortable chair. She’s a German eco-warrior determined to restore the house in the most ecological and expensive way known to human kind. When we were younger and crazier, we fortunately never had enough money to throw at our old farmhouse in the Corrèze. Fortunately, it remained a house with potential (for its proprietors’ ruin) until the day we sold it on to another dreamer.
In the car later we discussed our friends’ venture with heavy hearts. If only, I suggested, they had read my book about buying property in France. Perhaps the one truly useful advice I offered was that it’s often cheaper and quicker to pull down a restoration project and start from scratch. The cry of The Last Poets resonated inside my cranium: This is mad-ness! But there’s nothing you can say and nothing really that you can do to help. We all have to learn for ourselves, usually the hard way.
It took an eternity to get home. Having crossed the river Lot, we somehow found ourselves back on its south side. Map-reading, I was reminded, is not one of my dear wife’s talents. Nevertheless, we got back with 10 minutes to spare before said spouse had to order the fortnightly fish from the online co-operative. I left her to it and sped off down the road to pick up the dog from her godparents’ – or dogparents, depending on how you arrange the letters.
Will we go back for the next three years to take advantage of the 10% discount? I don’t know. It’s an awful long way. There’s an element of madness involved. Talking of which… I started with an example of modern madness. Here’s another in conclusion. In Brive on the first Sunday of August, on the way to the monthly brocante, we noticed that the fairly-fast-food emporium near the theatre now advertises itself as a Glacier Afterwork. Somewhere, in other words, where you can go after a hard day in the shop or the office and eat a nice unhealthy ice-cream sundae. The Blueprint wouldn’t advocate it. Le Aftaire-werk, alors. Yet another appalling misappropriation of the English language in the name of a trendy Esperanto. My mother and her mother were serial users of the word ‘vulgar’; they would have found all this so very vulgar. And, for all their faults, the French generally don’t do vulgarity. Or didn’t. When we arrived here, the Salon wouldn’t allow such linguistic depravity. You couldn’t even name your child Kevin. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking… Now, anything goes. This is indeed mad-ness.
