"NUAGES"

"Nuages" is the French word for clouds. It's the title of a very special song for me from the Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He was a unique musician who lived in the first half of the 20th century. He was known for developing a style we commonly refer to nowadays as "gypsy jazz", or a more p.c. term if you will: "jazz manouche".

I was thinking about this song when I shot this picture because of these beautiful clouds. When you listen to the song, you can imagine why he named the piece after those fluffy-looking white cushions floating in the sky. The tempo is quite relaxed, the band plays at a low volume and there are these chromatic lines going down in the melody. Chromatic means ascending or descending in half steps, using basically every note there is in the Western 12 tone system. The song is slow, soft, and floaty. Just like clouds.

I used to practice this song on guitar for a performance exam when I was still in music school a couple of years ago. I used to play it over and over again while listening to the record, trying to figure out all the weird chromatic lines he would play that didn't make any sense to me back then. And now they are still a mystery for me for the most part. And that's why I love this song so much. It oozes something profound and mysterious, yet it sounds very easy and light. It makes me feel kinda melancholic.

What adds to this feeling is the following: Around the time that I was playing Nuages so much, my grandfather on my mother's side passed away. He died quite peacefully from old age. So I still have a strong emotional association with this song. Not only because he passed away, but also because it reminds me of death itself. Death can be a scary thing that hangs above our heads, just like the clouds in my picture here. I'm very lucky and grateful that I haven't had to deal with too much death around me in my life yet. And I avoid thinking of death most of the time, like most people I guess. But by writing this post, I guess I want to remind myself of the inevitability of death and let it motivate me, and not scare me. My grandfather would've become 100 years old this year if he would've still lived.