I don’t know about you, but often in my spare time, if I’m not at the gym or out for coffee somewhere, or if I'm not reading a book or cracking nuts on some occasion, I have the habit of imagining where I would escape from a rainy day like the one today, while I'm writing this. What view would I choose to replace this landscape that I know like the back of my hand and is a bit boring to me? I must admit, I’m drawn to everything: to the sky that is upside down in Australia and to the aurora borealis at both poles, but also to the walls of some ancient city that are all over the world.

I would like to climb a few mountains while I still can, but also ride on a rollercoaster at a theme park. To watch Manchester United, to attend the Champion’s League. Everything counts, buildings and squares and towers and churches, but also concerts and football matches. Both the software and the hardware. In that anger at the rain and boredom with everything familiar, I would gladly run away anywhere, I think, even to Belgium. There is this stereotype that everything is boring there, that there is no big and exciting challenge that would make one go there. And then I wonder, what do I even know about that country? I mean, I know the basics, where it is, what it is, I had geography in school, of course, but why should I go there now when it is raining? There it must be very good and rich when the media is not talking about them. There is no chaos in the country, no fuss, or at least it seems that way. Oh man, it must be so good and stable there that they don’t even need to have a government. They were without a government for 652 days once. Imagine that! 😊 Besides, they don’t have a single, Belgian language, but they have three – French, German, and Dutch. They are famous for the things I really don’t care about – beer & chocolate. I mean, I stopped eating chocolate a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know about Seka and Braco chocolate or the Kras chocolate with rice which I didn’t like… Milka came later. But they say Belgian! You must try it before you die. Me? Nah, no me interesa, I can walk by it and not even notice it. The same goes for beer. And beer is not as strong as vodka 😉 Although I don’t drink alcohol at all anymore. I knew about the cheap beer, Zajecarsko, Niksicko, what else do you need? They say that there are hundreds of small and big breweries in Belgium, that they have more than a thousand types of beer, that there is a special glass for every type, and that a Belgian will be offended if you use the wrong glass!! No thanks. Let me know, please, about that chocolate and that beer where I am wrong, what am I missing from life?

Then I remember that I know the most famous Belgian ever, but that I don’t have to travel to Belgium because of that. In fact, I don’t have to travel anywhere. He is a Belgian immigrant who went to London to pursue the career of the most famous private detective. I mean Hercule Poirot, you guessed it. That little angry, arrogant Belgian know-it-all annoyed everyone. He was the best at everything and was aware of it, he looked after his mustache with such obsessive care that he drove us all crazy... and then there was that walk, that extra weight, chubbiness, don’t even ask, we adored that little man. And personally, he was so annoying and intrusive that even his creator Agatha Christie was annoyed by him so much so that she tried to get rid of him, to kill him in 33 books, but she couldn’t because the publishers and readers were crazy about him.

Thinking about famous Belgians - Hercule Poirot and the Smurfs*, over chocolate and beer, especially the beer, a thought came to my mind that I came across a long time ago. As a great lover and admirer of jazz music, I have read some books, reviews and articles about anything and everything on that subject and in those reading came across the fact that an English writer, Arnold Bennett, who btw, shares the honour with Gioachino Rossini that the dish omelette was created for him, uttered the thought that came to my mind in connection with beer: „The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer”. And then boooom! So yeah, man, music, the saxophone, that instrument was invented by a Belgian, Adolphe Sax. Why do I think about fictional characters when that country has real, great people who did great things. Two native Belgians, both dear to me and both from the field of music: beside the aforementioned Adolphe Sax there is also Django Reinhardt. But they are not just any people, they are great people, fighters you don’t see every day. They are the people who have indebted the world with their struggle, their life and their talent and have shown how you don't give up even when life tries to humiliate you.

Charlie Parker, Art Pepper or Wayne Shorter, my favourite saxophonists, would remain unknown if Adolphe Sax in Brussels in 1846 had not given us the instrument that was named after him the saxophone. Plato believed that music gives a soul to the Universe, and the inventor of the saxophone fought many times to stay alive for the sake of that soul. In order to ennoble the world and change the history of music, Adolphe Sax had to conquer death seven times. Adolphe had his first encounter with death as a baby when he was learning to walk, fell down the stairs, hit his head on a sharp stone and, to the general surprise of his relatives, survived. When he was three years old, thinking it was milk, he drank a glass of diluted sulfuric acid, and soon after swallowed a metal buckle. And just when he recovered from all these accidents, a new one happened to him - a powder keg exploded! He also fell on a hot iron wire that burned half his face, and three different times he lay down in a freshly painted bed and God knows how he woke up each time. And that is not all - a roof tile fell on his head during a walk, and he almost drowned in the river once. With great will and struggle, Adolphe Sax did not allow the universe to prevent him in his intention to spread beauty, he continued to design instruments and despite his own mother's prognosis, he died at the age of eighty.

And on a cold January day in the year 1910 in a Roma village under the clear Belgian sky the boy Django was born. Little Manush, which is the name of the French Roma to which the Reinhardt family belong to, spend their lives in constant wandering. Immersed in the archaic and free world of Roma who did not recognize the civilization and time in which they lived, Django spent his barefoot youth and coming of age in the contradiction of the traditional Roma life of the Manush people and the poor and drunken life in Paris, where he played the banjo in bars. He never wore a suit and never lived in a house until he was seventeen.

At eighteen, he owned a suit and his own house on wheels filled with colorful paper from which Bela, Django’s wife, made artificial flowers that she sold. One drunken night, Django knocked over a candle, colorful flowers caught fire, and the car became a glowing blaze whose flames licked the November sky. Second and third degree burns disfigured his body. Paralyzed right leg and burnt fingers of left hand turned the musician Django into a disabled person who was in danger of having his leg amputated. Everyone thought that he was done with music... But, that „crazy Manush“ refused surgery and after a year of painstaking rehabilitation, he managed to walk. When a year later his brother gave him a guitar, practicing his hand with day and night playing and severe pain, Django developed a new musical direction - gypsy jazz (or gypsy swing) and from the torment of the stiff second and third fingers of his left hand, he developed a completely new technique of playing the guitar: he played solos with two healthy fingers, and held the chords with the stiff one. He turned his flaw into a virtue, into a victory. And what a victory! So virtuosic, so powerful, so musical...The rest is history...

Well, I mean, not everything is in the sights of a city or country, there's something in famous people too! 😊
And Adolphe and Django both represent the victory of the will. They teach us that there are no situations that life, the state, politics, or the universe can impose on us without us fighting back. The two of them and their lives are a victory, a triumph of heart and passion. A triumph of talent and life.

When you sit in a Belgian park, or drink a beer in a Belgian cafe, put some Django gypsy swing trackin your ears or music of the gorgeous Wayne Shorter and you will see how then even the rain can't do anything to you.

Let’s go to Belgium.
Cheers!

*Yes, those little blue creatures that live in mushroom houses and their nemesis Gargamel are also Belgian



JJ Beba