Most of us, listening to music for the last thirty-one years, concentrate on rock, rock and roll, hip-hop, or country, with or without western. Also, there’s blues, which is rock and roll but slower, sad and black.
But there is another genre called “jazz” that may have escaped a lot of people’s attention, largely because most of it is on records. Or it’s in clubs so small you think they’re part of the Korean sewing shop next door, or with too low a ceiling to go in wearing a bike helmet.
Maybe they pass this music by on the radio because they hear a saxophone in it, or way too much piano.
And it’s hard to imagine Wayne’s World starting with a song in B flat minor 9th suspended 13th.
But steadily, for many years, jazz has kept going without the glitz and attention that sustains its rockin’er brethren. It doesn’t help jazz’s awareness that it rarely makes the news. In jazz, nobody jumps off the top of a speaker during a drum solo, breaking their foot and their public-masturbation hand. In jazz, nobody calls themselves Big Fat Cocaine Sniffin’ Baby Killer. They go for more subtle, almost shy names, like Doc Pedals or Sooty Barstow. I made those up. But those are the kinds of names.
I recently decided to sample some of this invisible music to see what none of the fuss is about.
One of the first things you notice when you attend a jazz performance is the lack of Frisbee-throwing and firing of Silly String, pre-show. This is less due to more extensive pat-downs than is it to the fact that jazz attracts fans who look like they just heard of a close friend’s suicide. Besides, a Frisbee would knock over the small glasses of expensive brandy that in jazz replaces beer. Overall, a more subtle, thoughtful atmosphere prevails, like in a library of higher learning with waitresses.
People still talk excitedly before the show about the last time they saw the performer, but without referring to vomit or Mexican jails. Also when the jazz performer takes the stage, if a woman up front removes her top it is because she is itching somewhere.
Then there is the stage banter. There is less of it, and it is more about the songs, how they came to be written and who they are a tribute to than about how fuck yeah Cleveland.
There is a greater assumption in jazz that the listener has “done the work” to understand and respect the “subtlety” of the music, as opposed to how the encore tune was the first song they got banged to.
Another facet one notices is how often jazz musicians are sitting down. There’s little sitting down in popular music, except for drummers and those crippled by vindictive ex-girlfriends and meth lab explosions. Even piano players stand, in rock music, usually on the piano itself. In jazz, however, the sitting allows a closer relationship between the musician and his/her instrument, whether a jazz guitar (any guitar not shaped like an arrow, a beast face or a dildo) or a “horn” (anything you blow in). In my research, I saw three separate acts that featured no guitar at all, except for a tall fat one with no frets that was stuck in the floor on a spike and only had four strings.
The concentration on the instrument in jazz was remarkable — one could almost call it a communion, but without the priest’s hand on your inner thigh pretending to look for wafer crumbs.
What most newcomers to jazz sense first, once they realize there isn’t a mosh pit, is the sheer number of chords. The average number of chords in country and in blues is three. The average number in rock and roll is four. The average number in hip-hop is none. But in jazz, the average number is 127. This is made possible by using fingerings (the word is unavoidable but it doesn’t mean that) that extend the music beyond what any reasonable person can hear. A rock and roll song that goes from A to D does it with this common change: Start with A, then go to D. A jazz tune does it in a progression that looks like the answers from two pages of a Swedish medical exam. And still they sometimes don’t get to D. What’s wrong D? I don’t know what they’ve got against it.
(I say “tunes” instead of “songs” advisedly. Some jazz is sung to, true, but using words and hand-flippy gestures that look and sound like when a kid from 7th grade Wood Shop wanted to use the bathroom. This may be why it is called Scat.)
There are tributes in jazz, just like in rock, but usually the person tributed is called Bird, Chet or Mose and does not have a current Kickstarter to buy them a new camper and/or liver.
I have touched on drugs, but not much (in this review). It is a fact that many jazz greats were hooked on heroin. No Molly, no Ketamine, always always heroin. This may be because their generation was first exposed to the music that would define their youth, and therefore their lives, when waking up to a battery-powered radio in a military hospital. I can’t account for it any other way. Many reported, before dying in an alley, that the heroin made them feel more creative. Perhaps it accounts for those funky chords, many of which have a desperate sound, like someone trying to score junk at EPCOT. I think this needs more examination although not by me.
There was a Queen album called Jazz, but it didn’t contain any jazz. This is similar to how there was an R. Kelly album called Chocolate Factory.
Not much has been written about how jazz affected politics in the larger cities of America in the 20th century. But I’ll keep looking.
It has been a privilege to draw back the curtain on this little-seen genre, and to hopefully expose people to it who might previously have thought that to be good, music had to be about rockin’ all night long or how you got a disease from a girl in Frisco, although those, of course, are worthy themes “in their own right.”
