EMMA RAWICZ

EMMA RAWICZ QUARTET AT TURNER SIMS, SOUTHAMPTON – 18/04/23

My attempts at being friendly are meeting with dwindling returns. Twice I’ve asked people how they are this evening without being asked in return or any further conversation ensuing. The first time the lady at the drinks kiosk looked at me with something almost verging on suspicion and certainly at least enjoying some common ground with wariness. The second time the white-haired man checking tickets – a staple of the TURNER SIMS scene – just sort of snorted as if me asking him how he is is just completely absurd, or at least rather droll, and certainly not to be entertained. Strange, I think. And I wonder where I am going wrong, because certain it is that I am going wrong somewhere. The fault, I’m certain, is sure to be mine.

All about me.

The people sitting behind me are talking about someone called Beatrice who went to see Titanic The Musical and found it “really enjoyable”.

The band is introduced by the grey-haired woman from the Southampton Jazz Club. She seems nervous here, in the more formal surroundings of the Turner Sims concert hall, but she does the job. She gets her point across. There’s no raffle tonight though, which seems a shame. 

The music begins with some lyrical piano playing from Ivo Neame, and it creates this mental image of my writer self as a leaking ceiling with a bucket beneath it. The leaking ceiling is my mind and the bucket is my writing. Every so often I have to empty the bucket. How often I empty the bucket depends on factors outwith my control, like how much it rains, for example, or the things other people do or say. Neame reminds me in appearance of what I imagine French philosophers to look like. I imagine him enjoying a stereotypical cup of coffee with Jean-Paul Sartre, even though I’ve got no idea what Jean-Paul Sartre looks like, and I just looked up what he looked like and he looked nothing like what I imagined, and actually couldn’t have looked less like I imagined him to look. The jazz seems kind of philosophical too – at first, certainly – as if it’s trying to work itself out as it goes along, and sees Neame reaching into the bowels of the Steinway grand piano he is playing, as if the metal and wood it appears to be made of are just a façade that hides a deeper reality. 

It’s interesting what saxophone players/band leaders do when they’re not playing. Some consult their sheet music; some close their eyes, nod their heads and drift off; some sit stony-faced, eyes fixed ahead; others pace back and forth at the back of the stage. EMMA RAWICZ watches her bandmates appreciatively, smiling often, even sometimes making expressions of disbelief, when they do something particularly impressive, which is often. I like that because I find it incredible too. I just have no idea how anyone gets so good at something. Actually, I think I do: they just practise a lot and focus all their energy on one thing, rather than a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, like dilettantes like me. A bit of drawing, some writing, ooh I think I’ll make an album, take a few photographs, make a little collage ... all the while having a full time job and two young children to help look after. That’s not how you get good at something, is it? You’ve got to focus on one thing. You gotta focus, dude. Jesus.

During the interval I go and buy a CD from Rawicz. She signs it with a gold sharpie. I ask her how she got into jazz growing up in Devon. She says she started off playing classical on the violin, but then saw a big band and that was it. Jazz took hold.

Back on stage Rawicz is having a good night. “Can you tell?” she asks. She sold all her CDs, which “never happens”, and seems really pleased with how things are going, which is as it should be because it does seem to be going very well indeed. There’s a clarity and liveliness to her playing, like fresh air or running water or a cold glass of orange juice, which reminds me of the way that squirrels run around the trunks of trees chasing each other and jump from branch to branch for whatever reason it is that squirrels jump from branch to branch – just for the hell of it maybe, and why not? One of her songs – a new one, I think she said – is named after a German word that means the feeling of being alone in the woods (I think the word is “Waldeinsamkeit”) and I like that. I like the thought of that feeling and there being a special word for it. And I think, maybe that’s how music makes me feel: like I’m alone in the woods.

Alone in the woods