‘Despite the fact that I doubt whether you like jazz very much, I would still like to offer you a free concert/background concert, if you need one when you are in the Netherlands’, Koen wrote to me on July 31, 2021. Although I am also I was in doubt as to whether I liked jazz, I took up the offer. One can learn to love a lot and it seemed like a good resolution to love jazz like an unseemly mistress. In addition, you have to accept some offers.
After all, it was something different than a reader who offers his manuscript in the hope of receiving favorable comments. Sometimes it seems as if only readers are writing.
Fortunately Koen was there, reader and jazz pianist.
The first time I met him in December at the home of the actor Hans Dagelet. Jazz was played, there was coffee.
Koen intrigued me. A young man with medium length brown hair who I could well imagine as a bar pianist in a French film from the sixties. The bar pianist falls in love with the wrong woman and is then shot dead behind his piano by a mobster.
After the concert Koen was silent, but that suited the tragic role he played in my imagination and I told Hans that I could remember stories about legendary performances by Toneelgroep Baal, founded by Leonard Frank.
“Is Leonard Frank actually alive?” I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Dagelet, ‘he’s an Uber driver these days.’
That message struck me even more than a death or horrific illness. Yesterday’s legends are today’s Uber drivers.
Last Friday Koen came to my mother’s house to improvise on the piano with my godchild. Then I took an Uber. The driver’s name was not Leonard again.
Life, one big improvisational exercise.