All That Jazz

I was listening to a talk radio program on the way home the other day and they were doing a segment about some jazz performer. I wish I were smart enough to like jazz, but I’m not. I get some of it, kind of. Just not a lot of it. It’s especially frustrating because I know the problem is me, not the music. This is obvious to me because when I hear it, everyone involved seems like they’re having a great time. But I just don’t get it.

When I was young, Dad had a friend who was a musician, along with being an artist.This guy loved jazz but he hated impressionist paintings. Dad’s friend always felt that impressionist paintings looked unfinished.

I remember thinking that this was a little strange. It seemed to me, in my vast knowledge of both art and jazz (ie: none at all), that there was a similar relationship within music and jazz as there was within visual art and impressionism- that a large part of it involved conveying emotion. I liked impressionism and figured at the time that my not yet fully matured brain hadn’t been given enough time for the jazz appreciation areas to develop. I figured those areas would develop over time.

But after all of these years, I guess I’m in a similar boat with jazz as Dad’s friend was with impressionism. Except with me, it’s not so much that jazz doesn’t sound finished exactly. With me, it’s pretty much the whole process. The musicians seem plenty talented. It’s just that all too often, it seems like they have trouble playing together.

On the particular radio program I was listening to, they played a “song” and it had the quality that I hear in a lot of performances - it started off with a bass player, presumably sitting off in some dark corner, who began plucking away. So far, everything was good. But then the drummer came in and things started to turn south. He was playing at a completely different tempo, seemingly oblivious to the bass player, and then one by one, more musicians joined in- each doing their own “thing”, which in this case meant trying to figure out what the other guys were playing.

This rambling struggle went on for a while until eventually, the sax player came up with the idea of blasting out a note that sounded a lot like a goose getting hit by a two by four- which apparently he liked because he kept repeating it, a little louder and a little more painfully with each rhythmic blow. The others in the band heard this, and they began to circle around, searching for notes and a rhythm somewhere in the vicinity of what the sax player was belting out- weaving higher and lower as they tried to zero in on the same general theme.

Finally, the whole thing coalesced into something that vaguely resembled a melody. I believe the term for this is “finding their groove”. And when it seemed that they were pretty much all on the same page, the audience began applauding- whether out of relief or what, I’m not exactly sure. Then everything thing wrapped up in a loud crescendo of instruments along with whooping and whistling from the audience.

The whole thing reminded me, in an odd way, of feeding the ducks with Sam (and not because of the goose-like sounds).

When Sam and I go to the duck pond, one or two of the more outgoing ducks start honking and they come up to Sam, while all of the others are scattered around in the background- occasionally squawking but pretty much ignoring us and doing their own thing. As Sam starts tossing bread to the ducks closest to him, they develop a certain rhythm to their squawking. A few of the other ducks look over and think (presumably), “Hey, those guys have something going on over there.” So those ducks start squawking a little louder and a little faster and they come over to get in on the action. Before too long, all the other ducks have joined in, each still squawking, but somehow, as they form their mob, they seem like they’re squawking in a slightly less disorganized fashion.

To me, jazz- at least the piece that I was listening to, seems to be a lot like this.

This could all go back to the original problem that I suspected years ago, which is that the jazz portion of my brain hasn't fully developed. God knows the rest of it is pretty immature.