Feet don’t fail me now. In go the earphones, strike up the band. Muscles warm to the intro building, breath baited, waiting for the band to explode. When they do, the beat kicks through my body and my feet hit the ground running. I skip to the patter of sticks on the high hat, bop down the road with syncopated stride. I dart through backstreets to the rhythm of the backbeat, effortlessly, like a sax in solo flight.
No bass is walking in tonight’s show, just a crazy rhythm to make you move your body fast. Now we’re cooking. A frenzied gallop exorcises another stale day from my system. Arms swing free and fast, legs move deftly and lightning-quick, leaving my torso behind. My heart pounds deep and loud like a bass drum. A trumpet man is playing. He dissolves the tensions of the passing day in pure liquid phrases and brings to the music an infectious groove.
Together we blow, locked in an untouchable moment – a moment when my two favourite things, running and jazz, collide, to create an energy wave that will carry my body through the next hour or so. Feet don’t fail me now. I speed through familiar places. Places I see everyday, every time I leave my house. But just as great tunes sound fresh in the hands of a new musician, so these old streets take on a different identity every time I run – Paris, New York, London or any other great world marathon. Who cares? Anywhere but home.
These are the places I come to to lose myself. Places I come to to dream or forget. Places I come to to be free. And it’s freedom I chase tonight and every time the pavements beckon and I plug my iPod in. A physical freedom, of course – two legs and a modicum of willpower are all that is needed to take a runner anywhere. But more than this, escapism – freedom from the day-to-day mundane, from insidious reality TV, from the superficial materialistic culture that defines our epoch.
Running is the antithesis of all these things – simple but challenging, exciting and real. The effort, pain and discomfort, the determination, achievement and joy are all integral parts of what it is to be a runner. Those who understand it know exactly what I mean. But combine the world’s greatest physical pursuit with the artistic liberation of jazz and you have a recipe for a profound spiritual freedom – a search for unshakable truths that are only unveiled by the extremes of simple purity or insightful sophistication. So as the jazzman plays, and I run, we seek the same answers.
He locked in a constant search for expression in a language so intricate as to render words inadequate. Me in quiet solitude, through the purest and most simple expression of the human condition there is. We are two extremes of the same circle touching spirits at a powerful apex, each fuelling the other’s intense recital.
Ihead up town to find my own audience – late-night shoppers, drunken revellers, down and outs…fragmented and uninvited guests to my own virtuosic performance. Some watch, others are lost in their own worlds. They plod and shuffle as I dodge, dive and weave between them. I skip and dance under 20ft spotlights and run in circles round the crowd. Sometimes they eye me suspiciously as I pass – faces loom out from the shadows with features as dissonant as the stabbing piano chords that juxtapose bop lines in my ears. But they dissolve back into the darkness just as quickly as they appear and I leave them to the night.
Unlike the band, I have no connection with my audience. We don’t dance to the same tune. These cats don’t dig my cadence. But passing these people reinforces my own need to run and find solace away from others, to push myself outside the comfort zone and hopefully to emerge a better person for it. Running is my freedom, but it is also my therapy.
Without it I’m a caged animal, pacing and snarling, wired on excess energy and frustration. But with cool jazz soothing my hot temper and a tail wind pushing my bones, I ride the crest of a wave to the unknown, both before me and within me. Sixty minutes pass in the snap of a snare so I leave the lights of the main stage behind and head once more for the backstreets.
Cheering in my headphones tells me the band has finished but they’ll take the stage again for one final encore. Our tempos are slower now. Still swinging, still free, but the energy depletes as the show nears its end. No magnificent crescendo, fatigue sees to that. This is no race. We just ride out the last number together waiting for the time to stop. Breathless, I arrive home. The fading few notes in my ears signal our brief voyage into the realms of freedom has past.
But still I am left with one underlining truth – with or without jazz, to run free is to be free. Free in mind, body, soul and spirit. But more important than this, and perhaps the real reason we all run, is because it allows us the one ultimate freedom – to be free of the people we would be if we didn’t run. In my case, the person I used to be. Out come the earphones, the show is over for another night.
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