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On the road to peace - and all that jazz
IN the end, it turns out to be perfectly simple. To achieve
peace between Israel and the Arab states, all we need is a
Road Map.
The Americans, acting with fellow cartographers in the European
Union, Russia and the United Nations, claim to have drawn
up a neat grid of motorways and by-roads which will have us
all driving safely to a common destination.
I'm only slightly confused, because the mapmakers call themselves
the Quartet. It's a quaint, Fifties word - Gerry Mulligan
had a Quartet with Chet Baker, for instance, and Dave Brubeck
had another with Paul Desmond.
These quartets blew a lot of cool, West Coast harmonies,
and smoked a lot of 'jazz' while they played a whole lot more.
But they didn't create any roadmaps that I know of. I'm not
really a jazz aficionado, of course - I love the music, but
I couldn't tell you who was sitting in on drums for Miles
Davis on this night in May, 1952, at New York's Birdland.
To acquire that sort of learning, jazz fans rely on capacious
memories and an intricate system of notes and cribs, which
they fold up and store in their beards.
I have just such a friend, a retired college lecturer called
Andy, and I called him earlier today, to check some facts.
The first question I asked was: ''Andy, am I right to say
Dave Brubeck had a quartet?''
The answer, in effect, was 'sometimes' but it took Andy over
20 minutes to say so. Then I asked if any jazz quartets had
ever drawn up roadmaps.
He checked through his memory and his beard carefully, and
said: ''You'd be taking a terrible risk if you even got in
a car with most musicians. Imagine climbing into a pink Thunderbird
with Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet, for instance.''
That sounded like an ultra-cool road trip, I said. You could
make a movie about a ride like that.
''But they wouldn't take you anywhere that led to world peace,''
Andy warned. ''You'd be guaranteed to get into fights, in
fact - or at least find yourself hiding behind the piano in
a 3am drinking den in Chicago, with the bar stools flying.
''The hardline Muslim sects wouldn't approve, especially
as jazzmen like girls who don't wear burkas. Or anything much
else, really.''
My research was making headway. I'd established that the
Road Map Quartet was not a swing band. It was a fine image
- Colin Powell blowing his own trumpet, Tony Blair as a guitar-toting
sidekick, Kofi Annan on maracas and Vladimir Putin thrashing
away lethally at a drumkit with a pair of broken vodka bottles.
But if it's not a real Quartet, maybe it's still a real Road
Map. General Powell won't let anyone see a copy until next
week - he's still busy colouring the main highways in blue
and red and adding wriggly green sideroads, I expect.
I'll be first in line at WH Smith's to get a copy, because
I have long harboured an ambition to drive my 1976 black Cadillac
Brougham across the Holy Land on a Peace Journey.
I have bolted bent cutlery to every inch of the bodywork
- hundreds of knotted spoons and forks, given by just about
every great celebrity I ever met, from Muhammad Ali and John
Lennon to Salvador Dali and the Dalai Lama.
I'm not allowed to drive it in Britain: there's an insurance
issue when you try to motor through a built-up area in a ton-and-a-half
of classic car that is festooned with prongs and points.
When I carve someone up in traffic, I really carve them up.
My dear friend Byron Janis, the celebrated concert pianist,
insists on joining me on my Peace Journey, and that adds another
difficulty - Byron never travels without his concert grand.
Fortunately, it's on casters, so we'll be able to tow it.
I expect we'll have to stop every hundred yards or so, to
let Byron out of the car to chase off kids who are scrambling
up on to the lid and twanging the strings.
I have never towed a piano, but it must be not unlike towing
a caravan, and I knew that my jazz expert Andy was a keen
caravanner, so I took the opportunity to ask for some tips.
''Don't corner too fast,'' he advised. ''And avoid hairpin
bends, because once a caravan starts to roll there's nothing
you can do about it.''
''Maybe pianos are more stable,'' I hoped.
''Don't count on it. I once saw Frank Sinatra lean on one
a bit too heavily, at the start of One For My Baby And One
For The Road, and it rolled right off the stage and into the
roulette table.
''They say the piano player turned up six weeks later in
the Hudson River, wearing concrete boots.''
This doesn't bode well. If there's one thing the Quartet's
Road Map is certain to use frequently, it's the U-turn. Just
when you think all the traffic is heading in one direction,
there's a screech of brakes, a howl of tyres, and everyone's
racing back in the direction they just came.
And at the side of the road, strewn across a dusty ditch,
is the splintered wreckage of a concert grand.
Maybe I'm wrong to put my trust in a Road Map devised by
a Quartet of Russians, Europhiles, Yanks and puffed-up diplomats.
I have GPS, after all.
Global Positioning Satellites relay messages to my dashboard
and tell me with pinpoint precision where I am and where I
need to be going.
Like all Israelis, I've spent my life relying on my instincts,
my inbuilt GPS. I mistrust other people's Road Maps. And on
the road to peace, I am going to be wary of anyone calling
themselves a Quartet.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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