Much of my life has been set and guided by taste. Taste for melodies and rhythm, taste for colours and shapes, and certainly through the taste my palate has acquired.
The preference for what pleases the hearing and the palate have been prevalent, prompting me to develop special attention to these, to the extent that I have spent years experimenting with them. From the satisfaction of eating good food in my childhood, through diving into the universe of coffee during the past 30 years, a sheer pleasure and a drive for discovery have developed into a mission for increasingly understanding how to achieve natural and composed taste at their best.
These attempts at increasing reception of the best possible taste require exercises to help understand the qualities of the sounds or foods being perceived, but even more importantly of the way in which we use our perceptive systems. I only know two recipes for this: paying attention to what we intake and pay attention to the organs we are perceiving with.
Happily I repeatedly encounter individuals working in various fields, but equally aiming at increasing their perception abilities just the same. One of these is a talented fellow smoker and musician.
Christopher McGrath works as a sales associate for Nat Sherman Tobacconist in New York. A couple of days ago he handed me a bit of pipe tobacco in a plastic bag. He asked me to find some quiet time with one of my favourite tobacco pipes, stuff it with this mixture, smoke it while I eat dark chocolate and drink an espresso, and while listening to the Lyric Pieces for Piano composed by the Norwegian pianist Edvard Grieg.
A recording by the great Sviatoslav Richter is on its way to me.
