Neighbours

First full day in the Village. We have noisy neighbours but I couldn’t have wished myself better ones. In Barcelona I missed the Dutch music scene and when I arrived here I didn’t get too excited when I heard about the Jazz Festival happening in the coming days literally around the corner from our base. Cerkno is a small village, 2.000 inhabitants, I never heard of it. It is not too far from the capital Ljubljana and it is hidden in a valley surrounded by mountains. It is rainy and chilly but apparently we are lucky. In one of the recent years it snowed during the festival. And rain also means we can catch a lot of water and use it.

When soundchecks started I checked the program. My mouth fell open. Aki Takase, Marc Ribot, Paal Nilssen Love, Ken Vandermark and “our own” The Ex. As special guest in Cerkno we had free entrance for the full three days. Somebody came over to give us all an invisible black light stamp.

Official opening of the Village in the afternoon, full suit and tie. Golden shoes. Same for the festival. Going somewhere in my suit counts as work. I work a lot and with a lot of pleasure.

Earlier today one of our hosts from the Cmak Cultural Center had asked me what I was going to work on here. I didn’t know what to say. I was lost again. In my ideas, thoughts, starting points. I remembered the quote I had started my proposal for the Nomadic Village with. “The best planning is no planning.” Masanobu Fukuoka in The One Straw Revolution. Philosopher and natural farmer. The man who became known for the so called “do-nothing farming” (which is the opposite of being a lazy farmer but asks for a lot of attention in different ways). A permaculture hero who never aspired being called like that. The man who re-introduced the seedballs being used these days in Guerilla Gardening and travelled the world to talk with men in power about using it to fight desertification.

The festival also has some workshops in its program. One is a workshop for children where they will record natural and urban sounds and then combine them into compositions, Sound Safari. Another one is “How creative musicians work” and the one I was especially interested in is “Wild Food during Jazztime”, collecting and eating wild edibles in the area surrounding Cerkno: Wild Food Improvisations.

In the entrance to the big tent there were some CD stands and one of them had a collections of books as well. There was a walking guide and to my surprise it covered a long long walking trail from Barcelona to Cerkno. If only I would have known ..... and would have had more time .... and .....

But the conditional past is a tricky tense. I want to get it out of my vocabulary. So I told the man I had seen announcing the musicians on the stage earlier that it means next year I might walk here, all the way. Leaving and returning.

I checked the other books. There was a big slightly old-fashioned one, beautifully bound. It was titled Revolucija Ene Slamice. Only when I saw the name of the author I realised what it was. Masanobu Fukuoka. Published here last year.

I was finding my way.

I lost myself in Aki Takasi’s solo performance and went to the afterparty with the musicians from the band that played before her, a wonderful trio founded by Igor Matkovic being accompanied by the Polish pianoplayer Marcin Wasilewski. As a quartet they are called “Long Distance Journey”. We talked about travelling and being on the road.

Walking, music, travelling, dancing. It is all the same thing in a way. Making lines. Leaving invisible traces. So we danced. And when they left I danced with the locals and visitors from nearby and far away. Bread and slices of sausage and ham appeared on the tables for the hungry people. I wondered if there was some of the dried stomach they are known for in this area. The barman was a slow dj but we enjoyed the long moments of silence inbetween the songs.

At some point a girl came up to me almost dragging along the wild edible man I by then knew as Dario Cortese. She pointed at my shoes and said to him: “That is why you can’t dance! You need shoes like that.” He was wearing sturdy walking shoes. I disagreed. You can dance on anything. And he told me he wasn’t a very good dancer and hardly dances. But we agreed on the fact that it doesn’t matter how you dance, where you dance. You can dance with minimal movements, even without moving. It is all in your head. You can dance without legs. He said he preferred walking in the woods, touching the earth slowly, let his eyes wander, move along the trees. I told him that was his dancing.

I danced some more, the dancing got more intense, more people joined. When I took a break on one of the comfortable benches, eating some of the bread and dried meat, I looked up and stared into the face of Han Bennink across the wall, his eyed closed, a drumstick in his mouth. I felt at home.

And when I returned to the dance floor Dario was there as well. Dancing.