Jamie Tiller: Farewell

poems, readings and music from Friday, 3rd November

Firstly Steve, Tasya and I want to thank you for coming here today to be with us at this time. And to thank Jeremy Crossley and everyone at St Margaret’s who, as we sat in Berlin wondering how we could best honour Jamie, have been our strength over the past few days

While Steve and I were trying to think what we could write, say, tell you about the beautiful man who was Jamie Tiller, and what a precious son to us, brother to Luke, husband to Tasya and Papa he was, we were also reading so many messages, words and thoughts from his friends and colleagues from all over the world. We would so love you to read some of them when you have a moment – on Instagram, on sound-cloud comments, in the many music magazines that paid tribute to him. Even we as a family learned things we didn’t know about him.

We discovered so much more about the many wonderful and different ways in which he had shared his passion for music, and more recently food and wine. We learnt how many of his friends had enjoyed his infectious wit and his totally self-deprecatory sense of humour, which often had them, like us, crying with laughter, and the sense of fun and playfulness that were part of his creativity. We especially loved reading one friend’s description of a favourite set they played together where Jamie, ‘wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, dad-dances throughout in a state of bliss, stopping only to enthusiastically hug his fellow DJ or jump into the mix.’

We’ve been touched by how many of his friends spoke about what an inspiration he had been to them, ‘he pushed me to listen to my heart’, and discover so many younger DJs and music curators speaking about how much care he had taken of them and supported them in their own work. Those of you who remember how we used to make Luke and Jamie stand with us outside the local Co-op to collect for striking miners, or march in support of the NHS, or against war, will understand incredibly moved we were by how many friends spoke of his powerful sense of justice – at one point losing an agent for speaking out about the need for the geeky and nerdy music world to take issues such as Black Lives Matter seriously. A friend of both Tasya and Jamie told me, ‘the two of them taught me to have proper ethics’.

One of the things both my sons used to do over the years was to send me texts they were working on, at any time of day or night, which they felt might require a quick CT editorial overview. So, when Luke called me in the middle of the night to tell me he needed me to write a poem for the farewell service he and Tasya and his partner Catherine were holding for Jamie in Mexico, and it needed to be ready in one hour, it felt unsurprisingly familiar and pretty much par for the course.

So, at their insistence, I am braving sharing the short acrostic poem (beginning each line with a letter of Jamie’s name) I wrote.

Chrissie Tiller

LIGHTING UP THE FIRMAMENT

Jamie the joy-giver,
Artist extraordinaire. So giving, so generous. A beautiful man. Through
Music from Memory, the world became brighter. A lover of life,
Inspirational friend. Authentic and open, your warmth and your
Empathy, caring for others, has always shone through.

Tender Papa and husband, dearest brother and son,
Imaginative maker, creator and thinker, so
Loved by so many, you
Lit up our lives. Your passion for life, for this world is your legacy.
Eternally shining, you light up the heavens now. Brilliant and
Radiant. A star in our hearts, illuminating the sky.

WHEN GREAT TREES FALL: MAYA ANGELOU

A dear friend shared this poem with us, telling us how she turned to these words of Maya Angelou whenever she experienced loss.

When we read it, it seemed to us, as her words so often do, that Angelou captured everything that we wanted to say. Especially the last verse. Steve Tiller.

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

A BROTHER’S REFLECTIONS: LUKE TILLER

Chrissie and Steve have asked me as Luke’s friend to read his eulogy to Jamie on his behalf. Luke, as always, has been a total rock for the whole family over the past few weeks ever since he rushed down to Mexico to take care of everything and everyone including a beautiful remembrance in Mexico and taking Tasya and Maxi safely back home to Berlin but has now returned to the US as he needs a little time to grieve and heal himself as a loving big brother. He is with us all in our hearts today. Peter Phillips

I remember being quite young and thinking how much of a pain it must be for Jamie to have to follow in my footsteps at school and in early life – which on reflection seems perhaps a little bigheaded. As it turned out I didn’t need to worry about him being in my shadow for long, as he quickly became accomplished at almost anything he turned his hand to – football, art, graffiti, photography or DJing.

It has often seemed odd to me growing up with a barely reformed Marxist as a father that we grew up so entrepreneurial. One of the many gifts our parents gave us, however, was the idea that if you wanted to do something in the world you needed to make it happen yourself and not sit around and wait for it to fall into your lap. Luckily Jamie found entrepreneurial endeavours in life all about bringing happiness to people through beautiful things.

Over the last week or so I’ve been touched and comforted by reading all the comments and posts about Jamie from his friends in the world of music and I have especially enjoyed listening to them share their musical tributes to the sounds that he uncovered. It dawned on me during this time that there was a theme to the Tiller boys’ passions: sharing beautiful, meaningful, and important things that they’ve uncovered with other people. Whether it is birds, wild places, theatre, opera or Jamie’s main passions: music and wine.

In my mind Jamie has always been like a Bowerbird – collecting shiny and joyous treasures to share with other people. Like those birds, Jamie also had that need for the collection to be just so – striving for perfection in everything he did. I feel that desire too and wonder if he also sometimes felt it to a fault – if only for those that lived with our complaints about life’s imperfections.

Though starting a bar during a global pandemic didn’t necessarily seem like the smartest investment opportunity in the world, I knew that if one person was going to make such a difficult business work it would be Jamie. His charm, his attention to detail, his sense of style and taste, his stubbornness and the support of his friends all convinced me that he’d be a success. Plus, it’s not every day that you get the chance to be an investor in the coolest bar in Berlin. Of course, being Jamie, he paid my loan back in nine months – well ahead of his seemingly optimistically scheduled eighteen.

Though he found himself in a business that can be competitive, he seems to have surrounded himself with the most wonderfully warm and lovely people and it heartens me to read that he found time to be generous of both time and spirit. Hopefully going forward we can all strive to do a little more in our lives to find the space and capacity to encourage and nurture others in the same way that Jamie did.

I spent this past week looking through our old WhatsApp messages for something deep and meaningful to share today, but it’s mainly just general chitchat. I’ll note though that the pandemic, with all its looming fears, suddenly made it feel urgent to say some things of meaning to loved ones and I’m thankful for that. For me that was just the need to tell Jamie how proud I was of him, that I loved him and to apologise for the times I was the incredibly annoying older brother.

Though there’s never enough time to share with loved ones I am thankful for all the moments that we had over the years, most recently in London, Los Angeles and Berlin. His warm smile is a final memory captured on my phone outside a dive bar in Altadena.

A FRIEND’S THOUGHTS

Good morning and thank you all for being here. Thank you also to Chrissie for the invitation to speak. Jamie’s dear friend and partner at his label Music From Memory Tako could not make it today due to illness, so Chrissie asked me to say some words on behalf of his friends. Tako is greatly upset that he could not be here to share this moment with us all, as his love and admiration for Jamie knew no bounds.

I wanted to share some thoughts about Jamie that I hope will convey how many of his friends and peers saw him. My own parents and family friends are still slightly bewildered by what I do, and since this is a room full of people that have known Jamie since he was a child, I thought it might be useful to give a bit of insight into the musical world that Jamie inhabited, a world largely inaccessible to people with normal, balanced, healthy relationships with their interests.

The world of record collecting, like any fringe interest or hobby, can be incredibly isolating: you spend years accumulating niche information that is so specialist it runs the risk of disconnecting you from the world. But it can also be incredibly bonding, as you can’t fail to appreciate when you meet someone in whom you see your same enthusiasm. This is the space in which so many of us connected with Jamie: in behind-the-counter meetings in record shops and late-night listening sessions where our passions and dreams achieved a life of their own. Together with Jamie, we listened to music, travelled looking for obscure records, we danced, and we exchanged little known LPs as if we were children trading cards in a playground.

This is a world of idiosyncratic obsessives that often run the risk of becoming one-dimensional, but Jamie always stood out. Jamie was a uniquely gifted person; an astute cultural observer who was blessed with a natural sophistication that allowed him to reinvent himself in whichever image he put his mind to… excelling first in photography, then music, and finally, wine. He was a person who was interested in the stories records carried rather than in the objects themselves, and in the shared moments these cultural artefacts could create. Indeed, records and the music they contain were merely starting points for the experiences and friendships they led to. Through his label, Music From Memory, Jamie sought to tell some of these stories, rescuing trailblazing musical voices that had been lost in the margins of an immense, invisible wilderness and forging fresh connections for them with the contemporary music world.

I always felt that his background in photography shaped Jamie’s approach to music. Nobody could put music together like he did. He had a visual, synesthetic way of connecting with sound, and the way he presented music – whether in a mix, in a club, or in the Music From Memory releases he so meticulously curated – triggered a visual response in listeners. He was incredibly sensitive to his surroundings, and it was like the whole world slowed down in his company. He saw the unseeable around him and immobilised slices of time, locating beauty, pleasure, and humour in the subtle details of everyday life. I have no doubt in my mind that Jamie would have achieved success as a photographer after he finished his MA, but in the end, music broke through and he turned his passion into his life.

It is hard to overstate the reach of Jamie’s influence or the musical legacy he leaves behind. Through his work with Music From Memory, Jamie changed the way we listen to music. This is not hyperbole; the world we live in – from the radio we listen to, to the records we buy – sounds very different now to how it did before Jamie. Music, like photography, is a tremendously effective medium for showing people beauty, and Jamie not only saw beauty where others hadn’t, but he managed to translate his vision and frame it so that others could comprehend and participate in it. His ears were always optimistic: he saw the world as a wonderful place and we all followed where he guided us to, re-tuning our own ears to the sounds he heard in his own imagination.

Jamie ears were, indeed, golden, but let’s not forget the smile that they helped frame. A day or night with Jamie was always rousing and his friends would leave every meeting with a fire in their bellies and, most likely, a hangover looming in their heads. Time spent with Jamie was always full of laughter because even though he was serious about his passions, he didn’t take himself seriously; he wasn’t precious or pretentious, and just wanted to share all which he loved. This is what makes friendships that grow from shared connections so meaningful and, irreplaceable. They are the friendships in our lives that we choose, not the ones that we inherit, and it was inspiring to be caught in Jamie’s orbit. This is why he means so much to us – he made our lives richer, more beautiful – but mainly, he gave us joy.

As the saying goes, every person’s life ends in the same way, but it’s only the details of how they lived that distinguish one person from another. Jamie’s was a life well lived: full of love, laughter, and accomplishment. Now that Jamie is no longer with us what remains is his legacy, engraved indelibly in his work, his friendships, his family. The world around us has become a little smaller and certainly a lot quieter without Jamie, but he will forever live on in these things.

We love you, Jamie. John Gomez