Miles Davis’s Trumpet

Religious imagination can be sensu stricto inhuman. It suggests scenes and images that defy understanding, swinging between extremes from ecstatic rapture to the terrible dread of the sacred.

Against this background stands out the unceasing work, sustained across generations, of slowly taming this wild religiosity.

Homo sapiens domesticates everything in its surroundings. From a doctrinal, ardently religious point of view, this cannot succeed. Yet we keep trying. The Christian Resurrection, heralding the universal eschaton, is proclaimed by the sound of a trumpet. Why not? Let it be a trumpet, since the Apostle says so (1 Corinthians 15:52).

As long as it is not a trumpet sounding a military reveille.

Let it instead resemble the one heard in Paris just after the great war. In 1949, Miles Davis could be seen in the bars of Saint Ghetto des Prêts, with a very young Juliette Gréco helping him play.

And for everyone awakened by that swinging sound, a free black coffee. Why not? It would be a human resurrection, on our Western scale.

Smoking and fantasising without a filter are, of course, permitted.

On trumpets: the archangels—Israfil, Michał (Urbaniak), Miles Davis

backing vocals: three angels—Raphaela, Juliette Gréco, Ewa Demarczyk

photographs: Andre Sas, Philippe Charbonnier, Czesław Czapliński

sound stretched between the eleventh and twentieth centuries.

direction of the whole: Instant, Moment