The King in Yellow

And goodbye to all that. The title was a last bridge from hep C personified as an apocalyptic figure leading a tarantella across a medieval wasteland, accompanied by a jaundiced chorus in motley under a lowering sky - to the rediscovered pleasures of jazz.

The King in Yellow is a short story by Raymond Chandler about a hophead jazz musician ( shades of parker, beiderbeck et al) and sprung to mind 'cause it was all I could do today to watch robert mitchum in Farewell My Lovely on video (I was too tired to do anything else after my final injection yesterday - had plans, tried to go out but couldn't, didn't want to, and finally slumped and surrendered).

The therapeutic value of Mitchum as Marlowe/Mahler shot stark from below in a window frame, massive and prophetic, speaking of mortality in the clipped poetry of Chandler above the suffused visceral lit bloodflow auto-pulse of LA is surely without parallel. Perfect pitch.

I am heartily sick of Hep C and have grown weary of my own condition - will be vastly relieved when I officially finish treatment next Thursday. Only six more days to go.

Midway along the journey of my life

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How hard it is to tell what it was like,

this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn

(the thought of it brings back all my own fears),

a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.

But if I would show the good that came of it

I must talk about things other than the good.

How I entered there I cannot truly say,

I had become so sleepy at the moment

when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth;

(opening lines of Dante's Inferno)

Pray, let me not forget the value of industry when the medication ceases and I begin to recover my physical prowess (more so than before without the Promethean virus continually vexing my liver and sapping my strength).

Pray, let me not be forgetful, become sleepy and drift.

Dear God, let me value every moment of existence and rejoice in the wild abandon of being here, the sensual pleasure of the exploding spring and the accompanying riot of my own body.

'Produce, Produce for the night cometh when none might work!' - Carlyle

And while we're at it, waxing lyrical-like, lets pay homage to a true king in any colour - the late great genius of the tenor saxophone and true heir to the pure 110 proof spirit of Coltrane - Michael Brecker (pictured above).

Every time I pass the Union Chapel on Upper street, Islington, the memory of your solo performance there, most notably Naima and African Skies ( the whole place hushed spellbound holding its breathe in holy awe) comes flooding back, joy unbounded. Not to mention that first time at Ronnie Scots with joey calderozzo on the Hammond, and the Barbican with Herbie Hancock.

That last, I felt I was within the construction of a great cathedral that kept building and forming before my eyes. Backstage afterwards you said of Herbie hancock, "He's a genius, he has this capacity to hold all these parts simultaneously and grasp the whole and realise them not just through his own musicianship but through us" and I knew as you said it it was a mirror statement equally applicable to you. Its only now that you're gone I'm beginning to realise how good you were. Seen others since but the thrill is gone I fear. Thanks Michael.

Right, that said, I'm off to take my final dose of Vertex (and thereby replenish the metallic electrolyte coating of my entire mouth) and, appetite whetted, listen to some music.

Bill Evans I think, I'm still a little too fragile for the robust commitment of full-on saxophone possession. Its a serious business where the unwary can be swept away. Music hath alarums to wild the civil breast and all that. You don't believe me? then try listening to In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra all the way through at the painful end of a relationship - or Only the Lonely. Or, on second thoughts, don't. Like Jackson Pollock for the ears, or Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken .... to be treated with great respect. Goodnight.