Sublime

‘You’ve heard something?’ asked Paul Ziller, the leader of the Ziller Quartet. He had no work permit, his quartet was disbanded, but each day he went to the Jewish Day Centre to practise in an unused cloakroom, and each night he dressed up in a cummerbund to play bogus gypsy music in a Hungarian restaurant in exchange for his food.

Even the circus freak side of my face – my damaged half – was better than the alternative, which would have meant death by fire. I didn’t burn to ashes. I emerged from the flames like a little phoenix.

We often think of life as a series of events that happen to us. As a result, we neglect the fact that it’s often a series of actions that we do to ourselves. Having grown up under the guidance of jazz cats back in the ’40s and ’50s, I’ve seen and done the hard drug route, and I used to smoke four packs of cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period.

It turns out I’m not a pop star, per se. That was part of a ripple effect of what I do, and perhaps it will be again. It was a stage along the way: an odd Alice-in-Wonderland, exciting, tricky, confusing chapter. It turns out I’m a songwriter. It turns out my job is to write about what I see and what I’ve learned and what I feel and what I know. I