How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jazz

Forrest Gump's proverbial box of chocolates has lately begun to feel more like Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans during a chocolate and sugar shortage. You never know what you're going to get, but the odds are not looking particularly good.

Today, I would like to tell you a story.

It is about a perfectly ordinary person, who happens to be a woman, trying to get through life and all the stuff that happens around us. I won't tell you much more about that. I am sure you know what I mean.

Anyway. This woman — all right, me — didn't know whether she liked jazz. Jazz was around. My partner liked it. I tolerated it rather as one might tolerate football. Rugby I actually like. Boys will be boys, boys and their toys, and all that.

And so, on May 15, 2025, I found myself in the Aula of the Central University Library in Iași, waiting for pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri to play Transylvanian Dance . (you can listen on Spotify here)

I had done a little research beforehand, so I knew that Ban was born in Romania and had lived and worked in New York for many years. Maneri was American. Their ECM album took as its starting point folk songs and dances collected by Béla Bartók in Transylvania more than a century ago.

So: a Romanian-born jazz pianist and an American violist, playing music gathered from Romanian villages by a Hungarian composer. The whole thing looked like catnip to me. After all, how bad could jazz possibly be?

I was prepared to be entertained. I wasn't prepared for what actually happened.

I don't know whether it was the vibration of the piano strings, Maneri's viola, the obvious joy the two musicians found in listening and responding to each other, or those old Transylvanian melodies somehow still breathing underneath everything they played. But for almost two hours, I had the peculiar sensation of being completely in the present and somewhere very far in the past at exactly the same time.

Toils and troubles somehow melted in the cauldron of jazz.

There were two musicians in front of us, improvising now, in Iași, in 2025. And somewhere inside their music were people who had sung more than a hundred years before. People who had been in love, frightened, lonely, hopeful, jealous, tired. People who had wanted things. People who had lost things. People from villages most of us have never heard of, singing about things all of us somehow know. People just like me.

And this is where jazz began to make sense to me. Not as a genre. As a conversation. At some point, Mat Maneri was asked what it had been like for him, an American, to enter this Romanian musical world. His answer stayed with me. As I remember it, the traditional music behind Transylvanian Dance awakened in him something akin to what he felt in gospel and blues, something spiritual. I understood exactly what he meant. Not religious, necessarily. Not solemn. And certainly not some vague, incense-scented idea of spirituality. Something much simpler.

Human beings, separated by geography, language and more than a century, recognising something in one another. Perhaps this is what music does when we stop worrying about whether we understand it correctly. Or when we stop worrying about each other. Or perhaps simply when we stop worrying.

There was one moment in the concert that made all this wonderfully clear. Before Ban and Maneri played Make Me Lord, Slim and Tall, we heard the original recording collected by Bartók in Transylvania in 1914.

A voice came from another century.

Fă-mă, Doamne, ce m-oi face...

Make me, Lord — what you will...

Again.

And again.

The voice sounded ancient and plaintive, full of suffering and surrender. For more than a minute the question returned, hypnotically:

Fă-mă, Doamne, ce m-oi face...

Make me, Lord — what you will...

I listened, increasingly moved.

What enormous existential anguish, I thought.

Life. Fate. God. The human condition.

And then came the answer.

Înaltă și subțire.

Tall and slim.

Apparently, the soul can contemplate eternity and still have opinions about its waistline.

I loved her immediately.

And perhaps that little moment explains better than anything else what I took home from my first jazz concert. The spiritual and the ordinary don't have to live in different rooms. Neither do past and present. Neither do Romania, Europe and America. Neither do folk music and jazz. Neither, perhaps, do people.

I still don't know much about jazz. I'm beginning to suspect that I don't have to know much to listen, and love. Because that evening I stopped trying to decide whether I understood jazz, or whether jazz was for me, and simply listened. And I heard something I already knew. Beauty and absurdity. Sorrow and play. People calling to one another across a room, across an ocean, across a century. Perhaps that's all I needed to know. I just wanted to listen again. More closely. Deeper.

And somewhere between Lucian Ban's piano, Mat Maneri's viola, Béla Bartók's old recordings and an unknown Transylvanian woman asking God to please, whatever else He had planned, make her tall and slim, something began to stir. It would take a few more toils and troubles, and a Greek summer — more on that later — before that something finally had a name.

UnisonJazz.

Carmen

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