Change

 

Eberhard Weber, his expressive German bass playing, so distinctive and elevating, his own, but ours, for hours, sounds like sounds from another time today, as I listen to its timing, its timeline like the road that bends over the red railway bridge at Ivanhoe and descends past the Boulevard across Darebin Creek towards the fantasy apartments of Yarra Bend in the middle of the pandemic. There’s only one, pandemic. In those days the common cold is what we caught, when we went out the front door. A plane flight to Stuttgart was but a taxi away. Mysterious how elegant music listened to over years with simple gratitude of a sudden with change sounds like messages from another age. The music signatures itself into time, a time before the global virus, a time of expanding world travel, toward a different future. This our future of contracting world travel, contracted thus. Listening to accomplished lines and riffs and improvisations as I travel along in a fitted face mask, I enjoy what a reviewer must once have called its “technical prowess”, the mask my last resistance to an invisible airborne Greek letter. I once went to hear Jan Garbarek, at Hamer Hall, I did, knew some of his records over and over, but someone said listen to the bass player, he is amazing. The bass line clean and direct, like the road taking me past garden homes and concertinaed shops towards the towers of change on our horizon, where the papermill was taken down brick by brick for an estate of apartments materialising in its place behind storeys of scaffolding. The road is just the same but how I see the road, has changed. I wish I knew where this music was taking me, and this road, comforting as both continue to be. Music, not played like that, or recorded quite like that, anymore. Cordial greetings from the 20^th century, says the electric bass of Eberhard Weber and his musical companions and the cambers of the old road making fluctuating dips and smooth bends across the riverine landscape. Like others I think, is it me? Is it all in my mind? The corona like a film in the mind, a turnover, turntable, a turnaround has separated me from former familiarities. I reach out to understand them and their directions, a bass line so confident so eloquent so virtuoso in artistry it speaks without punctuation like the early colonial road that ends where we choose to pull the car over and park in a vacant spot. Listening to the manner he found from classical training and jazz change and his own natural gift for composition and performance once, Eberhard Weber they tell me playing in chunky ways that are funky and spunky and vibey and truly other words that mean something different now to what they meant then. Later that day, dusk, I will go online to reconnect with his 20^th century scribbling and plunging bass lines like no one’s business.