Joined: Sun Mar 07, 2010 10:48 am
Posts: 2255
Location: lordandkelly@comcast.net
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I thought the word "conversation" was hogwash. Good conversation or bad conversation really depends on what you like to talk about.  But....I don't really have an opinion one way or another....about Jazz that is. So I stole someone elses: This isn’t intended to offend jazz fans. I fully admit to two things: 1) I don’t understand jazz (I totally believe that music should be a visceral thing and not an intellectual one—if you have to think about it, then your mind is otherwise occupied) and 2) I have a mild form of senistesia that manifests itself as being able to taste music. This doesn’t mean that Beethoven tastes like chocolate or rich vanilla or the like; my mild form only works to define, in taste, the sound of what is to me, bad music. At best, jazz tastes like cold and rusty metal.
The jazz I’m discussing is not the Dixieland variety; it is not swing. However the general comment I’m about to make does apply to both. I started to try to listen to jazz in college. People who appeared to me to be ‘cool’ seemed to understand it, so I thought, why not? Musicology wasn’t new to me, but nearly all of it was focused on full symphonic sounds at that point and my lyrical understanding came not from opera but alternative music (when it really was alternative to something).
In a few words, I hated it.
The way I described it at the time is the kindest description I’ve given it. Gather an orchestra. Now release or execute the following members: All strings except the double bass (but take their bows away), percussionists who work on anything but the marimba and cymbals and snare drum (smaller drums will be added), if the woodwind has a double reed, they are released or shot, the same goes for the French horn. This should leave the ‘orchestra’ with what I call the supporting instruments—in this jazz is kind of like a musical form of Marxism. What’s left are the horns, minus the French variety, all woodwinds minus the double reed variety, the stand up bass, and some percussionists working on much smaller instruments than they are accustomed to. If they all sit, you have a swing band; if they march (except the basses) you have a Dixieland band.
About every five years, I do a recheck. I taste things I didn’t like before, read things I didn’t like before, listen to music and so on. The idea is that the more I learn the broader my foundation, therefore things may have become tolerable or good since the last time I gave them a try. Every time I try jazz, I find more reasons that I don’t like it. At this point I am talking about jazz of the 1950’s and beyond variety. My taste for Dixieland and swing have not changed and they sit at the level of tolerable (which means I get neither a taste, nor a sick feeling in my stomach).
For me sonority is the most important thing for any piece of music—dissonance is fine, but there needs to be a resolve for it at some point (however my taste for dissonance in classical music is growing mainly because the composers still use strings and other instruments not allowed in the pale with the jazz instruments).
I cannot play a reed instrument (though I find the oboe to be one of the most inspired instruments ever envisioned). The reason is simple, the vibrations of the reed tickle my lips and I half cough/half laugh in the whole in the reed or the one between reed and the rest of the mouth-piece. To be honest, it sounds like I’m giving a goose a prostate exam. I cannot play a horn. This comes from lip pain that I’m not comfortable with and no matter what I did, it always just sounded like a fart. So the main instruments in the jazz oeuvre are not things I understand well. However, that isn’t the reason I don’t like or understand it. I cannot play a stringed instrument either, but I can recognize when one is being played well versus one being played by a true adept. My ear is just not attuned to the brasses and the woodwinds not made of wood—to my symphonic ear, they are supporting pieces (except in the pieces by Sibelius and some works by Gershwin).
In the early days of radio (and of what would eventually become the LP) the higher tones of the strings and sopranos did not come across that well. But the medium tones of the brass and single reed woodwinds came across well. This had as much to do with the recording equipment as it did the speakers in the homes and cars. Sonic technology expanded very quickly, and by the middle 1950’s hi fidelity sound (hi-fi) and stereo sound began to be affordable. By this time, there had been a sort of quiet argument among the jazz community. As I understand it, the argument was posed like this: are we musicians or artists?
Aesthetics tend to affect more than just one discipline, unless there is some truly physical reason that the philosophy couldn’t be transferred. In this case, popular music was a little behind the times, but what it did when it metamorphosed into bop caught up very fast with the movement in the visual arts. Dada was a movement between the wars. The brutality of the first war pointed to some to the idiocy of beauty and function in art, so the absurd rose to prominence. This led to surrealism and other forms of play with the notion of the abstract that looks real. Then we came into the world where Picasso was representing things as fatter and fatter with planes all out of whack. Pollack was slathering paint with sticks. And the various schools of abstract and chaos art were born.
Along with that, music took a decidedly noisy turn.
Now abstraction came into jazz. Apparently what the adepts didn’t quite understand is that music, in any form, is abstract already. It is something that is beyond language in such a way that it can speak to a room full of people with no common tongue. The writer John Hawkes famously said he didn’t want to deal with plot, character, or setting. Why bother with the traditional tools now that the H-bomb can wipe us off the planet in a whiff of an instant? What Mr. Hawkes, and those who would completely dismantle the traditional without any interim steps, failed to realize is that those tools are common to nearly all of us. If you come at us with a story that has nothing to wrap the mind around, we’re probably going to say you are a hack or insane or just beneath recognition at all.
And so it is with jazz at this time.
The early image was of an orchestra without the star players for symphonies. Now I have realized that it no longer suffices because it is too diplomatic to explain the sound as I hear it (and unfortunately taste it). Take a large enough room. Put in this room, a piano, a stand up bass, a set of drums (no drumsticks though, just those messed up egg beater things that make a drum go swish instead of bum), a trumpet or coronet, a trombone, an alto sax, and a microphone for the singer. Ok that is 8 items for the band. Bring in someone who is good at playing each of those instruments and one singer (at least one of these must be a woman—and this is where it starts getting very strange). Write the name of each instrument, with microphone written for the singer, on a piece of paper and fold it. Each man will be wearing a silly squared off hat, pick one. Put the pieces of paper in this hat and shake. Now everyone draws.
Invariably the following happens. The woman picks the microphone, even if her talent is the piano. Everyone else picks an instrument they have never picked up before (or sat in front of if the piano). IF, and ONLY IF one of the people picks the thing for which they have talent, something different happens. In the first case you have a jazz octet who can play in any dive anywhere on the planet and sound just like every other octet on the planet—clangy and never quite together. If you are lucky enough for someone to pick the instrument for which they have the talent, then you have a front man and the backing septet that sounds clangy and not quite together. This is more likely to get you a record contract of some kind.
Now things get really interesting. Assume that at least one of the 8 is on heroin—this is the 1950s and many who played some instrument or wrote experimental poetry or prose were taking either it or the methadone the government provided. Plan the gig for early afternoon—just a little practice (as if it mattered). Lock the door. No one comes in, no one goes out. Make sure to have recording equipment. Turn on the recorder and tape it as the junky starts to jones. Have everyone pick up the instrument they drew or bang away at the keys of the piano. What you have now is an instant classic. If the junkie dies, you have an endless hit that every adept will pull apart using whatever their imaginations and veins can handle. If the junkie survives . . . try again—it only works if the junky dies. And it gets better. If the junkie is really a singer but you gave him a sax, then make sure to split the reed. The esoteric crowd will go as wild as pot will let them, which is why the Beats opted for snapping instead of clapping, they simply didn’t have the coordination to bring two separate hands together—hey and I like the Beats, just not the music they worshiped.
How in the world do you top this? Things get really strange now. Remember the goose I was giving a prostate exam? Turns out that geese don’t have those—my bad. Well fill a 1980s Chrysler LeBaron or 88 (color doesn’t really matter, but if you are a stickler for such things, it needs to be that gross color called pollen, the not quite yellow not quite green that matches the ick coming out of your nose in April) with the geese whose prostates I tried to find. They will be a little angry, but that is understandable. Oh, the car has to be in San Francisco. Oh, on top of Lombard Street. And there is no brake fluid in it. Put just a wee bit of chicken wire fencing between the front and back seats. The geese (and for that matter the handlers) are confused. The only way this works now is if you put an alligator at the driver’s wheel—it really doesn’t matter whether his hands are on the wheel—this car only goes one way. Turn on the quadraphonic, octophonic hi fidelity microphones on and record what happens now.
The alligator starts doing that really low grumbling they do to shake the earth. The geese go completely ape, or as ape as geese can go—this means that feathers really do fly. The handlers now give the car a little nudge. It creaks a little as it begins. No brakes, but hey, even if there were brakes, there is no foot to stomp it. The car goes speeding down Lombard with a lowing alligator and a dozen or so angry and humiliated geese honking and growling to beat the band.
Oh. Wait. They are the band. Momentum, broken only by concrete and the few pansies who tried their best to stop the speeding pollen colored car, takes the car towards the Bay. If you are on a hill, at some point you will end up in the bay if you fall—and you will end up there fast. The gator can sense the water, and so can the geese. They all think that they will be free so they all raise into this crescendo of lowing and honking and rattling; for just a moment, one ineffable moment, each animal thinks it will be free. I should mention that all of the microphones need to be water resistant to 30 feet and 28 degrees. There is one more ineffable moment. The moment, after taking out one more car and running over the foot of at least one tourist, when the car goes airborne before the inevitable fall into the scrotum squeezing cold of San Francisco Bay. The car hits the water and the tires burst. Each animal shouts (or does his version of this) for joy. As the cold water fills the car, the alligator goes into cold-blooded hibernation. The geese are elated that the gator is no longer a threat and that water is coming in for them to drink and wade in. It is only as they have to start ducking (hehe) that they realize that they cannot unlock the doors. The whole thing lasts about 10 minutes. Lay a vocal done by some homeless person bought for the cost of a hot cup of coffee and Blue Note has one track; they need six. Unfortunately, only birds will do for back seat fodder. The animal up front can be anything that you can shove in it, but it needs to make some righteous noise when bumping down Lombard Street as the car begins to hit terminal velocity (if you are truly heartless, a baby elephant in front of a Dodge conversion van is perfect). Don’t worry, none of the animals will be from the endangered list (that only happens for the Japanese Import) and the cars in the bay will help form a natural reef at some point, assuming that global warming continues and the water warms to the point of having coral attracted to it.
Here is the kicker. Each moment of jazz can never be repeated. The reason for this is that the person slapping, blowing or poking at their instrument or mumbling into the mic cannot repeat what they just did. This means you can take literally anybody willing to get up on stage and they can ‘recreate’ the Lombard Street massacre time and time again and it will never sound the same way twice. At this point, it no longer matters if the people you get can play any instrument at all. If they know which end to put their mouth on, or not, the crowd will love it. “I never knew you could play a trumpet by blowing in the horn—it sounds like looking in a telescope backwards looks, pass that doob around again I’m starting to not like the music.”
Art is only truly transcendent if something has to die to make it happen. For a six track Blue Note special, you can kill literally hundreds of birds and six large animals who tend to make lots of noise (or maybe as many as 10 if you put 4 chimpanzees in for the last track—oh, wait, that has to be for the import because chimps are endangered, or cute, or something). Nothing in the world will ever be as transcendent as that.
I have discovered something after the fifth time of trying to understand jazz—it won’t happen. I have discovered after having tried oysters (pronounced oysters or ur-stirs apparently by some according to the song) raw and cooked in each way possible that I will never like them either. Fennel and licorice make me sick (bad ouzo experience made that happen, but I wasn’t a big fan to begin with). I have never been able to eat pork because of a lack of an enzyme but I am not allergic to it, just can’t digest it. I have no allergies, so the only thing that stops me from smelling or tasting something is just my will or lack of it. I have learned over the years not to turn my nose up at the new. I have learned, and sushi is the shining example of this, that from time to time I do like something five years after the last time I tried it.
Something are forever though. Not liking jazz is forever. Oh. I was born without wisdom teeth—just a mutation with the number of teeth in my head that my jaw could support. Maybe it is in those teeth or the extraction of those teeth that the understanding of jazz lays. It is anyone’s guess.
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Obviously we don't all have the same opinions, interesting read this one 
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