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The wait will soon be over… |
Twenty two years ago, a truly talented wise man — one of a trio, fortuitously — recommended a record, “an LP”, that he said helped explain where his own startlingly original, beautiful, frequently funky yet immeasurably moving music had come from. Having sat rapt in attention on the front row of the circle at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre, elbows on the balcony, my head in my hands, soaking that music up for the first of many times when hours seemed like days, felt like seconds, I had to find this source at all costs… — hoping it would help unlock something… — and it turned out (rather proptitiously, and much to my surprise) that someone who lived near my mum and dad was actually selling a copy. (I think they call this synchronicity.)
It’s a mono record from around the time I was learning to talk, with only a foreign language with lots of accents printed outside and inside; oh, and therefore quite rare… — especially in the UK. However, this appears to be how the world crawls forward meaningfully: one astounding coincidence at a time. Oh, and therefore, the first time I had ever worked abroad, it had been in the city where the wise man was born and grew up with the best friend who now played drums with him (the second wise man): right around the time the band was getting together (with the third wise man) and my son was learning to talk. The city is called Västerås; the first wise man Esbjörn; and his band — which you may have heard, heard of (I do hope so) — was the Esbjörn Svensson Trio.