11/09/2023
Joel Grip's speech for Tristan celebration at PAS on September 7th, 2023:
"I think all of us being here tonight carry the profound and reassuring voice of Tristan within.
In our collective minds the cellist, composer, writer, dancer and improviser Tristan Charles Honsinger is eternal.
I will talk a little about what Tristan did to me because I think my experience is not unique but shared by many others. I will try not to use too many jazz critic adjectives to prove his position in the music scene, and I won't mention any names. But for those of you here who don’t know about his realistic and functional impact on the world wide warm and generously generating scene of creative music, I can only congratulate you - you have many fu***ng amazing recordings and films to watch and listen to.
Since he died - I remember this as a stormy cloudy and lightning struck evening. Around 7:20 pm, on the 5th of august I got the message from Laura: “he is gone”. It was a kind of mystical experience also because of the coincidence of reading about the Pueblo (native americans) and their belief in how to become nature, through dance and singing you can change its path. Becoming a snake (literally putting it in your mouth) and throwing yourself down the skies as rain and thunder will also provide the rain needed for your seed. As he died, the snake, Tristan, rained and rattled in Dala-Floda where I received Laura’s message of his passing. The lightning, and its snake tail attacking the ground came like a downpour towards change, for me and many others.
The scandalous event of dying, of evaporating into being no more except in the memories and tales of people is change joined with awareness. Awareness of our fragile and surreal time of possibilities we share being alive. Are you aware that only by becoming an antelope, you can surprise us with jumping out on the road in front of a fast running car? Tristan was not a Native American Indian but he sure was native to himself. He was his own borderfree planet, he was his own climate, and greenhouse gas. A thorough cascade of winds.
So. Since he died, I have continued talking to him. Maybe more than ever, I carry on with the dialogues we usually had on stage. This is peculiar of course because his voice also becomes mine. His voice, we all share in our minds, is also proof of facing him. Becoming him, also means becoming yourself. Without the other you are no one. So let’s make things clear Henry (yes, we called ourselves Henry and George. No one really knew who was who, but that was and is also the whole point). We become in the countenance (in the faces) of each other.
Henry!
Yes, George?
Why are you dead?
Because I am alive. But why are you alive?
Because I am dying.
Can you prove that? Now, don’t pretend, Henry!
Dear George, how could I not but pretend to believe in the retransplantation of your banana marrow!
It sounds like you had a blood transfusion to see if you were part goat or otherwise you will know when sometime becomes no time.
Touchée, I say beguiled and begotten to the deep side of love.
I am fishing to find the right note for an anthill in the pasteurized field of a Franzified cake of spider webs.
Your words are good for uncertainty and double doubtless dish soap.
George, didn’t you say you learned about improvisation when pretending to play Webern as a child?
Ha! To pretend is to amend duck fever. You have to pretend until you stop pretending. It took me ten years playing on the street to figure that out.
Do not laugh when it’s funny, is this the entrance to boredom?
No, suffering is the entrance into the spiritual. Through being like a mountain or a lake we have the ability to transcend to the creative forces that we are endowed with.
Creativity is the secret to immortality!
Chop up the onion. Being hungry is the gateway to clarity.
In that case, to relieve the pain of uncertainty, are you Hamlet or Murphy? The critics are divided, eager to hear your truth.
Is the cloud a whale, weasel or camel, Henry?
Let me draw my sword to test if you are really dead, George. Hangon it won’t hurt.
Tristan, for me, was less of a fading Beckett figure than a character elated by life itself, by the ecstasy of the drama, like part of one of Shakespeare’s plays in which presence obliterates us. Tristan never ceased to outdo himself, for better or worse. I called him up:
“It was all my fault, but I have learned a lot from it. I felt like Galileo during the Inquisition. But they had very good food at the hospital!”
Stubbornness and addiction, as he knew it, can play a prank on the imagination to the extent that existence is extinguished. Did you pretend you were dead when you were alive, George?
No, eh, yes, Henry. It is about utilizing the areas that already exist, accessing those with the means and weapons that are already to hand. We pretend, we become what we pretend, we are pretending for real, we assume, we anticipate, we expect nothing, we are permanent gaps in between, we suggest, we do not give in to what is assumed, we adopt the silence.
Tristan and I agreed to sail to Madagascar, when we met, before we became Henry and George. He had the ability to pull back the curtains within those he met. Then he tore them down and used them as if he was a bullfighter, a ghost or a carpet salesman. A tablecloth. Sit yourself down, the risotto is almost ready. Observations of the most everyday rituals formed the basis for the spontaneous turns that his music and performances took. With an infernal calm and an unsurpassable confidence in the face of the unexpected, he imitated and became what is closest to us, the sound of a fish market in Naples.
He left me and many of us with a profound and reassuring feeling of love. I am sad, but sad with a miraculous smile on my face, and a feeling of being ready to experience the mysteries of dying until we are no longer alive. Let’s celebrate that tonight."
[including short quotes from “Wander and Wonder” and Joel’s text on meeting Tristan in “Fönstret #3”.]
🎥 Video by Laura Sansan at PAS, January 27th 2023
![Tristan Charles Honsinger (23.10.1949 - 05.08.2023) 🖤We'll miss you deeply![ 📸 by Erin McKinney ]](https://img3.bars10.com/481/889/773072984818898.jpg)
