“Jazz is freedom.” - Thelonious Monk
(Actually, I think it was usually attributed to Thelonious Sphere Monk, as if the first and last name alone weren’t enough to prove his eccentricity. And there was sometimes a coda: “You think about that.” This piece, if nothing else, ought to count as proof that I really have taken that bit of Monk’s advice to heart.)
And I’m sure jazz was freedom for him and for countless others, musicians and fans alike. But jazz was never freedom for me - nor, I believe, my whole cohort of (mostly) white, middle-class, suburban kids whose primary exposure to the genre was through school-sponsored music programs. I suppose I can really only speak for myself, but I do hope some aspect of my experience will resonate with others. (If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this at all - or I’d be writing it in a very different style, at least, with a lot less punctuation and a lot more random tangents.) For me, jazz was the exact opposite of freedom. It was an imposition; an obligation; an expectation. It was a religion. A class.
*
When I first started to express interest in music as a kid, my parents (neither of whom are musicians themselves) did what any reasonable middle-class parents would do: they signed me up for private music lessons. At this point, I was already playing alto sax in my fifth-grade band. I had made it about halfway through the first Essential Elements book (favorite song: “Hard Rock Blues,” of course), had learned all the fingerings from low C to high D, and had even rocked a duet (canon-style) of “Frere Jacques” at our performatively non-denominational holiday concert. (Always one token Hanukkah song and usually something in Swahili.) But what I really wanted was to learn guitar.
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| I remember putting this album on my Christmas list but being too embarrassed to put its full name, so I just asked for No Pads, No Helmets. I’m sure I’d have felt the same way about Take off Your Pants and Jacket if I had actually gotten the joke. |
This was early 2003. Most of the music I listened to during this era was teen-angsty pop-punk: Blink-182, Sum 41, Simple Plan, New Found Glory. Skateboarding music for a kid who didn’t actually skateboard, though I did play a lot of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on my Game Boy Advance. Besides that, I also liked a lot of the more straightforward rock bands whose videos played on MTV: Linkin Park, POD, Nickelback. (Not too long before this was my Dark Period: when I would retreat to my bedroom every evening after dinner, listen to Silver Side Up on repeat, and work on my “novel” about a kid named David who died and came back to life, of which there are about ten extant, cringe-inducing pages.) And I was just starting to test the waters of what we might brand “emo” (although that’s a contentious term and I’m sure there are some purists and pedants who would take issue with my use of it [since nothing after Cap’n Jazz broke up can really be called “emo.”]) Taking Back Sunday, Coheed and Cambria, Brand New. (All bands I still listen to, by the way, and only partially for the sake of nostalgia.) You get the idea. Classic white-boy shit.
So that was my expectation when I started taking guitar lessons: that I would do all the exercises and learn all the chords as a tedious, but necessary means to the end of becoming the auteur-like frontman of a pop-punk band (the other members just placeholders, props; the implementers of my creative vision) who got to write lines like “Is this the beginning of the end or just the end of the beginning?” and then expound on their meaning and significance to fawning interviewers. I wanted to be Matty Healy from the 1975, basically, before Matty Healy even existed. (Or, to be more accurate, when he, too, was just a kid aspiring to be Matty Healy.)
And at first, it seemed like that’s how it was working. My first guitar teacher was a guy in his late twenties named Justin1. He had long hair, made crude jokes about women that I chuckled at uncomfortably, and taught music at a private high-school an hour away, which he would later try to recruit me to attend. Every Saturday at 11:30 AM, I got driven to the local music store and sat in a semi-soundproof room with Justin and worked on my G, C, and D. He taught me “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” and “Turkey in the Straw.” My mom brought me out to lunch afterwards. All was well.
Then, slowly, imperceptibly, like the proverb about the lobster in the pot of boiling water, things began to shift. One day I looked up and realized I was learning drop-2 chord voicings for “Have You Met Miss Jones?” (Which, no, I hadn’t.) In school, too, jazz band had started. As Alto 2, I struggled through a half-speed rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Every adult musician in my life had begun to push jazz. But it was a very gentle sort of pushing. It was implicit; assumed. The narrative had already been written: as you studied music, as you became more experienced and skilled on your instrument, you started to get more and more “into” jazz. (Or else you became one of those classical weirdos, but they were like the guys who are too nerdy for Chess Club.) There was no alternate story. Either you were growing to like jazz more and more, or you hadn’t listened to it enough yet.
By the time I was in high school and Band had pretty much become my life - my social circle, my afternoon and weekend activity - saying you didn’t like jazz wasn’t heresy, really, so much as it was actually unthinkable. Like members of any authoritarian regime, we policed ourselves. The propaganda had been so insidious that not appreciating jazz or pronouncing its famous names (Parker, Coltrane, Davis2) with reverence was tantamount to saying you weren’t a good musician. It was a sign of philistinism.
Not to mention a hint of racism. Back then, we still disparaged hip-hop, so jazz was also our “black friend”: our license to criticize 50 Cent without having to wonder if we were perpetuating racist stereotypes. (These days, though, I’m sure it has become mandatory within that world to express some degree of admiration for hip-hop, or at least “good hip-hop,” or at least least Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.) In any case, not “liking” jazz was not a valid option. It was a sign of a personal failing.
*
I’ve always felt that the basketball team once known as the New Orleans Jazz becoming the Utah Jazz in 1979 is a perfect symbolic representation of what happened to jazz itself. Jazz as I experienced it was much more Utah than New Orleans. It was middle-aged white guys wearing suits; it was affluence and privilege; it was the background music of swanky hotel lobbies where they had complimentary fruit-water.
In addition to the school Jazz Band, I also played guitar in a few extracurricular jazz combos, some of which even got what we all insisted on calling “gigs.” I performed at the Litchfield NH Strawberry Festival (which I later described as “somewhere Sarah Palin would get her picture taken and call it ‘real America’” - this was 2008, remember.) I performed during the serious parts of a few weddings, before people decided they wanted to have actual fun and replaced us with a DJ who played, like, the Black Eyed Peas and stuff, which I found objectionable on principle but secretly enjoyed. I performed at stately, sober tributes to the veterans of World War II.
This was a far cry from the jazz that Kerouac describes in On The Road, or the jazz of someone like Langston Hughes: passion and frenzy and madness and ecstasy. And yet that was the image that everyone still peddled. Absurdly, the genre of jazz had become inextricably linked in our minds to the very idea of innovation and experimentation, even when its actual nature had become stiff and lifeless. Aping Charlie Parker solos from the Omnibook was framed and understood as a creative act. “Jazz is freedom.”
Who is to blame for the Utah-ification of jazz? If you ask me, it’s Wynton Marsalis. Not single-handedly, of course, but he definitely was a major figure in its transformation from a living to a dead art form. (See his infamous 1986 confrontation with Miles Davis, who may not have made anything good in the 80’s, at least was making things that were new.) And he is even more useful as a symbol.
Wynton Marsalis turned jazz into repertory music. He wanted it to be taken seriously, which meant treated like classical music, which meant putting it under glass and on the stage and into the classroom. He helped turn the jazz world into a world of idols. A world full of Miniver Cheevys, after the protagonist of the E. A. Robinson poem of that name, who “loved the days of old / When swords were bright and steeds were prancing.” Everything new is terrible; everything worthwhile happened Back Then.
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| Another classic Miniver Cheevy type: the antagonist (?!) of Ready Player One. |
Last year, I got dragged to an assembly with my students, which featured a speaker who was ostensibly there to give some sort of motivational speech about kindness and respect, probably, like everyone else who gets paid to speak to middle-school students in that sort of environment. But his real claim to fame was that he had played on the same high-school basketball team as Lebron James. So it was a little sad. He asked the audience if they had any questions for him; he got twenty about Lebron and maybe one about himself. He didn’t seem to mind too much, but it still kind of bummed me out.
And that is pretty much how most of the jazz “cats” (another stupid piece of anachronistic lingo, like “gigs,” that everyone in the community still insists upon) I met seemed to me. Obsessed with the past, clinging to the most tenuous ties they could come up with. There’s a jazz autobiography out there by someone you’ve probably never heard of3 called I Walked With Giants. “With.” That says it all right there.
In 2008, during my junior year of high school, I wrote the following confession in my notebook: “I don’t know if I love jazz like everyone else seems to. It’s almost like I’ve been pushed into it by every teacher I’ve ever had. I don’t know. Maybe I do love it. But often, it seems like a ‘should be doing’ rather than a ‘want to do.’ Like whenever I’m listening to rock or pop music, I should be listening to jazz instead. I feel like writing this is almost blasphemy. I don’t know how to explain it except that I guess my head is elitist against itself?”
Despite my doubts, in the summer of 2009, I attended the Skidmore Jazz Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York. This was a decent two weeks, overall. I went with my friend Peter (whose experiences with jazz are both intertwined with and surpass my own; he got much deeper into its inner sanctum than I did before leaving it) and we spent a lot of time playing pool and hanging out with people who weren’t from suburban New Hampshire, which is an important life experience for those who are. But it was also a crucible: a concentrated, amped-up version of our lives back home. It was like having Jazz Band all day every day, which is kind of like eating pizza for every meal (which I did do for a while in college, but that’s a different story.) Even if you love pizza, you hit a point where enough is enough.
At Skidmore, there was competition and elitism; in-groups and out-groups. I was told to use more chromaticism in my soloing, and so every non-chord-tone I played became a point of pride. It brought a feeling of relief, of safety, of freedom from criticism. (Never mind that chord tones sound better, and for good reason.) I was taught by one instructor that No True Jazzman read music, that you weren’t shit unless you knew every “tune” in the Real Book by heart. Another one chided me for arrogance because I wasn’t looking at the chord changes during a jam session. Both perspectives were common in the jazz world, and no one ever seemed to acknowledge the contradiction. You were simultaneously expected to do both, just as you were expected to be both reverential and revolutionary.
We watched old, grainy videos of Wes Montgomery and Charlie Christian in guitar lab. We huddled like sycophants around guys who had played with - or played with people who played with - the Famous Names, who had “walked with giants.” We devoured every story, every fact about the old masters, no matter how irrelevant or apocryphal. If they were nice guys, great; if they were assholes, even better.
Every bit of it contributed to the mythology, the hagiography. I left Skidmore convinced I would go to college and study jazz. The notion that I would probably be broke was part of the appeal. The romance of the starving artist. “Average people don’t appreciate real music.” That sort of thing.
But as my senior year of high school went on, my religious fervor began to wane. I rediscovered my love of pop music, for one thing.4 Honestly, hearing Funeral by Arcade Fire for the first time was - excuse the pun - a huge wake-up call5. “This sort of music is the music of today,” I wrote. “I feel like I’m struggling with assimilating past and present and future music . . . jazz was never supposed to be static . . . I mean, Charlie Parker already DID his shit and it’s great, but we don’t have to do that AGAIN, you know what I mean?” I stand by all of this except for the part where I said Charlie Parker was great. Ten years later, I can finally let it out: Charlie Parker blows.
But the jazz world doesn’t exactly encourage multiculturalism. It’s not one of those cars with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker. It’s more like one of the totalitarian ideologies embodied on said sticker. Other genres of music were not only a distraction from jazz; they were poison. A contaminant, a barrier to musical purity. Which was especially important for a convert like myself, someone who - as I was always keenly aware - hadn’t grown up with the music, and therefore had a lot of catching up to do.
I think part of what appealed to me about jazz was the sense of control it promised. The more you practiced, the more you listened, the better you would get and the more successful you would be. (The mythology of a Jazz Deity always included a statistic about how many hours a day he6 practiced - ten, twelve, fourteen - or some detail about where he practiced. In alleyways or restaurant kitchens or the cupboard under the stairs. Basically, the message was: look at how dedicated this guy was, you’ve got no excuse. Protestant work ethic shit. The same story you hear about, say, Jeff Bezos or whatever start-up founder the media happens to be infatuated with at the moment: wakes up at four AM, doesn’t consume anything all day except black coffee, yada yada yada.)
Excelling at jazz wasn’t easy, but it was simple. Formulaic; algorithmic. A meritocracy, rather than the total crapshoot of pop music, where it seemed like success was determined by your connections and luck. Jazz promised an orderly and just world. A world where the people who were on top deserved to be. (Of course, this was an illusion; jazz was really just as fickle and random and meaningless as the rest of the universe when you looked into it.) And I think that’s something everyone craves to some degree. It’s the appeal of all religions, and I see jazz as nothing so much as a religion7. And it’s no longer a new religion, spurred onward and outward by its own zeal, but one that has become mere tradition and ceremony. A perpetual chewing of the cud.
In April of 2010, I went to New Orleans with Peter and his parents to attend its famous Jazz Festival. By this point, my enthusiasm for jazz had waned, and half the time I even thought of it with antipathy. But I was still mostly in the closet. Or - I was “out” as a jazz-hater to a few of my friends, but I kept up the facade with my Jazz Band friends, and Peter was foremost among them. Besides, his parents had gotten the tickets months ago and I didn't want to be ungrateful, and it was still an opportunity to travel, to see a part of the country I had never seen.
And there was a part of me that wondered if maybe this experience would be the thing to revitalize (or vitalize) my love for the music. Maybe the problem was not with jazz in general, but the jazz scene in New Hampshire (which is not that far from Utah, semiotically speaking.) Maybe jazz was still alive in New Orleans, where it had been born.
It was a last attempt. If I didn’t love it there, then how could I pretend I ever would?
Honestly, I don’t remember too much from those couple of days. I remember that I had very little appetite - unusual for me, and annoying since it meant I couldn’t appreciate what is supposed to be one of the most culinarily-rich cities in the world. I remember the poverty: young black kids in white tank tops, hawking water bottles outside the festival grounds; tenement buildings so dilapidated it made me marvel that I was still in America - and the guilty awareness of my own privilege these images inspired in me. I remember walking down Bourbon Street and feeling like it was a waste to be here without being old enough to drink, and kind of wanting to try drinking anyway but not being bold enough to bring it up.
I remember the bands of high-school-aged kids playing music on the streets, the worst of whom could outplay everyone I knew back home. I remember hearing their traditional Dixieland-style jamming blend with the dance music pouring out of the clubs, and how for once it didn't seem like a contradiction. I remember thinking about how different their lives had been than mine, and how no amount of time memorizing chord progressions or forcing myself to listen to Giant Steps on repeat could ever change that. Jazz was in their soul. At most, it was in my mind.
As for the festival itself: I remember hating Nicolas Payton and being bored during Wayne Shorter; trying to make myself enjoy Earth, Wind, and Fire more than I really did (because they were the favorite band of one of my teachers, who was a major influence on me at the time8); experiencing a bit of culture shock in the “gospel tent.” But mostly what I sensed was a lack. A lack of anything that moved me or changed my way of thinking. There was no great revelation, which I suppose was in itself the great revelation.
Even in New Orelans, jazz was still Utah.
On the plane ride home, I listened to pop songs and cried because I loved them so much. It was over.
I have been trying to write this piece for about eight months now. (In another sense, of course, it’s been over ten years.) I first started it on another plane ride - this one from Boston to Phoenix, on my way to see the Grand Canyon - in April. In a state of pseudo-mania, I amassed three pages of scattered notes and lines and ideas. Maybe I abandoned it because it was so ambitious, so overwhelming. Even now I don’t feel like I got around to saying half of what I wanted to, and yet I’ve written twice as much as I’d planned. I wish I could write things that are sharp and pointed and direct. Curt, cutting. But I always meander. I always assume that more words is better.
That’s jazz logic, too: more notes, greater complexity is always a good thing. It’s a sort of showing off, I guess.
Since April, the idea of this piece of writing has been a thorn in my side. A perpetual source of guilt. I’d be reminded of it somehow - a Billie Holiday standard playing in Rite Aid, a post on Facebook from someone asking for jazz recommendations - and I’d think, “Oh, I really need to finish that jazz piece.” I even name-dropped it in some of the things I did manage to write during that time period. (From my ninety-percent-finished piece about travelling to London in June: “I can’t sleep on a plane, can’t sleep sitting up, not even with a pillow it turns out, and especially not when the guy two seats away won’t shut up about jazz, making me think I really need to finish writing that piece about jazz.”)
Ironically, the idea of writing about jazz started to play the same role in my life that jazz itself once had: a “should be doing” rather than a “want to do.”
I think one of the reasons why this was so intimidating to write is because I really did believe for a while that jazz was going to be my future. My present is largely the way it is because of jazz. I started college as a music major, because the wheels had been set in motion before New Orleans. When I left, I wasn't going to, but fleeing from. English was a default; teaching even more so. Besides music, reading and writing have always been my primary interests, and my taste in literature doesn't diverge all that much from the Canon of Serious Authors. (Case in point: I've got an E. M. Forster book beside me right now and I am loving it so far.) And I was always good at "doing school," so that continuing to inhabit that familiar world was an easy option. All that has changed, really, is my role; the drama is the same as it always has been.
I was a very obedient kid. I'd often be wracked with guilt because I felt like I wasn't living up to what the authority figures in my life expected of me. Which is certainly part of why I bought into the idea of jazz, why I threw myself into learning it even though I never responded to it aesthetically.
So abandoning jazz was, in a sense, coming to terms with the idea that the people I had trusted had misled me. It was a movement towards trusting my own impressions and judgments. And yet it also led to my becoming an authority figure myself. So I am also forced to consider whether the things I do as part of my job are having the same effect on my students that my teachers had on me. None of them had anything but good intentions. They all took me at my word when I said I wanted to get better at jazz, that I enjoyed it. No one ever saw through the facade. No one ever told me it was okay if I didn’t like jazz.
Granted, I don’t teach music, but I think the same principles are at play in all education. Is there really such a thing as education that does not - however gently, implicitly, or politely - impose a canon or method upon students? Education that is wholly non-coercive? I have my doubts. Even the most progressive approaches have certain ideas that are untouchable, unquestionable. All systems do. Jazz (as I experienced it) was just a particularly calcified system; an easy target. It’s like making fun of Scientology or Mormonism for its silly superstitions and rituals, and then heading to a Catholic mass. It’s the same thing, really; it’s just a more familiar form. So maybe I was avoiding writing this because it would mean contending with my own hypocrisy.
These days, it’s finally been long enough that I can start to mix some jazz back into my musical diet, little by little. I don’t listen to it very much (except for the Duke Ellington / John Coltrane version of “In A Sentimental Mood,” which I have always loved) but I have been learning some standards on piano. “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” are two of my favorites. Ballads, mostly. They actually sound good to me, and I now believe that is what matters in music. It's amazing that I once didn't.
I’ve always been jealous of my friends who didn’t have these sort of experiences or associations with jazz. They can dabble with it, put it on casually, take or leave it as they please. They’re like Americans who develop a passing interest in Buddhism (cultural appropriation possibilities and all.) But for me, jazz is still mixed up with that old sense of normativity, with that great Should, and I don’t think it can ever be fully extricated. It will always be the soundtrack to that period of my life, with all its pressure and self-doubt.
And that is pretty much how most of the jazz “cats” (another stupid piece of anachronistic lingo, like “gigs,” that everyone in the community still insists upon) I met seemed to me. Obsessed with the past, clinging to the most tenuous ties they could come up with. There’s a jazz autobiography out there by someone you’ve probably never heard of3 called I Walked With Giants. “With.” That says it all right there.
*
In 2008, during my junior year of high school, I wrote the following confession in my notebook: “I don’t know if I love jazz like everyone else seems to. It’s almost like I’ve been pushed into it by every teacher I’ve ever had. I don’t know. Maybe I do love it. But often, it seems like a ‘should be doing’ rather than a ‘want to do.’ Like whenever I’m listening to rock or pop music, I should be listening to jazz instead. I feel like writing this is almost blasphemy. I don’t know how to explain it except that I guess my head is elitist against itself?”
Despite my doubts, in the summer of 2009, I attended the Skidmore Jazz Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York. This was a decent two weeks, overall. I went with my friend Peter (whose experiences with jazz are both intertwined with and surpass my own; he got much deeper into its inner sanctum than I did before leaving it) and we spent a lot of time playing pool and hanging out with people who weren’t from suburban New Hampshire, which is an important life experience for those who are. But it was also a crucible: a concentrated, amped-up version of our lives back home. It was like having Jazz Band all day every day, which is kind of like eating pizza for every meal (which I did do for a while in college, but that’s a different story.) Even if you love pizza, you hit a point where enough is enough.
At Skidmore, there was competition and elitism; in-groups and out-groups. I was told to use more chromaticism in my soloing, and so every non-chord-tone I played became a point of pride. It brought a feeling of relief, of safety, of freedom from criticism. (Never mind that chord tones sound better, and for good reason.) I was taught by one instructor that No True Jazzman read music, that you weren’t shit unless you knew every “tune” in the Real Book by heart. Another one chided me for arrogance because I wasn’t looking at the chord changes during a jam session. Both perspectives were common in the jazz world, and no one ever seemed to acknowledge the contradiction. You were simultaneously expected to do both, just as you were expected to be both reverential and revolutionary.
We watched old, grainy videos of Wes Montgomery and Charlie Christian in guitar lab. We huddled like sycophants around guys who had played with - or played with people who played with - the Famous Names, who had “walked with giants.” We devoured every story, every fact about the old masters, no matter how irrelevant or apocryphal. If they were nice guys, great; if they were assholes, even better.
Every bit of it contributed to the mythology, the hagiography. I left Skidmore convinced I would go to college and study jazz. The notion that I would probably be broke was part of the appeal. The romance of the starving artist. “Average people don’t appreciate real music.” That sort of thing.
But as my senior year of high school went on, my religious fervor began to wane. I rediscovered my love of pop music, for one thing.4 Honestly, hearing Funeral by Arcade Fire for the first time was - excuse the pun - a huge wake-up call5. “This sort of music is the music of today,” I wrote. “I feel like I’m struggling with assimilating past and present and future music . . . jazz was never supposed to be static . . . I mean, Charlie Parker already DID his shit and it’s great, but we don’t have to do that AGAIN, you know what I mean?” I stand by all of this except for the part where I said Charlie Parker was great. Ten years later, I can finally let it out: Charlie Parker blows.
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| I first heard "Wake Up" in the trailer for this movie, which is James Gandolfini's greatest work, hands down. |
But the jazz world doesn’t exactly encourage multiculturalism. It’s not one of those cars with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker. It’s more like one of the totalitarian ideologies embodied on said sticker. Other genres of music were not only a distraction from jazz; they were poison. A contaminant, a barrier to musical purity. Which was especially important for a convert like myself, someone who - as I was always keenly aware - hadn’t grown up with the music, and therefore had a lot of catching up to do.
*
I think part of what appealed to me about jazz was the sense of control it promised. The more you practiced, the more you listened, the better you would get and the more successful you would be. (The mythology of a Jazz Deity always included a statistic about how many hours a day he6 practiced - ten, twelve, fourteen - or some detail about where he practiced. In alleyways or restaurant kitchens or the cupboard under the stairs. Basically, the message was: look at how dedicated this guy was, you’ve got no excuse. Protestant work ethic shit. The same story you hear about, say, Jeff Bezos or whatever start-up founder the media happens to be infatuated with at the moment: wakes up at four AM, doesn’t consume anything all day except black coffee, yada yada yada.)
Excelling at jazz wasn’t easy, but it was simple. Formulaic; algorithmic. A meritocracy, rather than the total crapshoot of pop music, where it seemed like success was determined by your connections and luck. Jazz promised an orderly and just world. A world where the people who were on top deserved to be. (Of course, this was an illusion; jazz was really just as fickle and random and meaningless as the rest of the universe when you looked into it.) And I think that’s something everyone craves to some degree. It’s the appeal of all religions, and I see jazz as nothing so much as a religion7. And it’s no longer a new religion, spurred onward and outward by its own zeal, but one that has become mere tradition and ceremony. A perpetual chewing of the cud.
*
In April of 2010, I went to New Orleans with Peter and his parents to attend its famous Jazz Festival. By this point, my enthusiasm for jazz had waned, and half the time I even thought of it with antipathy. But I was still mostly in the closet. Or - I was “out” as a jazz-hater to a few of my friends, but I kept up the facade with my Jazz Band friends, and Peter was foremost among them. Besides, his parents had gotten the tickets months ago and I didn't want to be ungrateful, and it was still an opportunity to travel, to see a part of the country I had never seen.
And there was a part of me that wondered if maybe this experience would be the thing to revitalize (or vitalize) my love for the music. Maybe the problem was not with jazz in general, but the jazz scene in New Hampshire (which is not that far from Utah, semiotically speaking.) Maybe jazz was still alive in New Orleans, where it had been born.
It was a last attempt. If I didn’t love it there, then how could I pretend I ever would?
Honestly, I don’t remember too much from those couple of days. I remember that I had very little appetite - unusual for me, and annoying since it meant I couldn’t appreciate what is supposed to be one of the most culinarily-rich cities in the world. I remember the poverty: young black kids in white tank tops, hawking water bottles outside the festival grounds; tenement buildings so dilapidated it made me marvel that I was still in America - and the guilty awareness of my own privilege these images inspired in me. I remember walking down Bourbon Street and feeling like it was a waste to be here without being old enough to drink, and kind of wanting to try drinking anyway but not being bold enough to bring it up.
I remember the bands of high-school-aged kids playing music on the streets, the worst of whom could outplay everyone I knew back home. I remember hearing their traditional Dixieland-style jamming blend with the dance music pouring out of the clubs, and how for once it didn't seem like a contradiction. I remember thinking about how different their lives had been than mine, and how no amount of time memorizing chord progressions or forcing myself to listen to Giant Steps on repeat could ever change that. Jazz was in their soul. At most, it was in my mind.
As for the festival itself: I remember hating Nicolas Payton and being bored during Wayne Shorter; trying to make myself enjoy Earth, Wind, and Fire more than I really did (because they were the favorite band of one of my teachers, who was a major influence on me at the time8); experiencing a bit of culture shock in the “gospel tent.” But mostly what I sensed was a lack. A lack of anything that moved me or changed my way of thinking. There was no great revelation, which I suppose was in itself the great revelation.
Even in New Orelans, jazz was still Utah.
On the plane ride home, I listened to pop songs and cried because I loved them so much. It was over.
*
I have been trying to write this piece for about eight months now. (In another sense, of course, it’s been over ten years.) I first started it on another plane ride - this one from Boston to Phoenix, on my way to see the Grand Canyon - in April. In a state of pseudo-mania, I amassed three pages of scattered notes and lines and ideas. Maybe I abandoned it because it was so ambitious, so overwhelming. Even now I don’t feel like I got around to saying half of what I wanted to, and yet I’ve written twice as much as I’d planned. I wish I could write things that are sharp and pointed and direct. Curt, cutting. But I always meander. I always assume that more words is better.
That’s jazz logic, too: more notes, greater complexity is always a good thing. It’s a sort of showing off, I guess.
Since April, the idea of this piece of writing has been a thorn in my side. A perpetual source of guilt. I’d be reminded of it somehow - a Billie Holiday standard playing in Rite Aid, a post on Facebook from someone asking for jazz recommendations - and I’d think, “Oh, I really need to finish that jazz piece.” I even name-dropped it in some of the things I did manage to write during that time period. (From my ninety-percent-finished piece about travelling to London in June: “I can’t sleep on a plane, can’t sleep sitting up, not even with a pillow it turns out, and especially not when the guy two seats away won’t shut up about jazz, making me think I really need to finish writing that piece about jazz.”)
Ironically, the idea of writing about jazz started to play the same role in my life that jazz itself once had: a “should be doing” rather than a “want to do.”
I think one of the reasons why this was so intimidating to write is because I really did believe for a while that jazz was going to be my future. My present is largely the way it is because of jazz. I started college as a music major, because the wheels had been set in motion before New Orleans. When I left, I wasn't going to, but fleeing from. English was a default; teaching even more so. Besides music, reading and writing have always been my primary interests, and my taste in literature doesn't diverge all that much from the Canon of Serious Authors. (Case in point: I've got an E. M. Forster book beside me right now and I am loving it so far.) And I was always good at "doing school," so that continuing to inhabit that familiar world was an easy option. All that has changed, really, is my role; the drama is the same as it always has been.
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| And Virginia Woolf makes up 60% of my Top Five Books of All Time list. |
So abandoning jazz was, in a sense, coming to terms with the idea that the people I had trusted had misled me. It was a movement towards trusting my own impressions and judgments. And yet it also led to my becoming an authority figure myself. So I am also forced to consider whether the things I do as part of my job are having the same effect on my students that my teachers had on me. None of them had anything but good intentions. They all took me at my word when I said I wanted to get better at jazz, that I enjoyed it. No one ever saw through the facade. No one ever told me it was okay if I didn’t like jazz.
Granted, I don’t teach music, but I think the same principles are at play in all education. Is there really such a thing as education that does not - however gently, implicitly, or politely - impose a canon or method upon students? Education that is wholly non-coercive? I have my doubts. Even the most progressive approaches have certain ideas that are untouchable, unquestionable. All systems do. Jazz (as I experienced it) was just a particularly calcified system; an easy target. It’s like making fun of Scientology or Mormonism for its silly superstitions and rituals, and then heading to a Catholic mass. It’s the same thing, really; it’s just a more familiar form. So maybe I was avoiding writing this because it would mean contending with my own hypocrisy.
*
These days, it’s finally been long enough that I can start to mix some jazz back into my musical diet, little by little. I don’t listen to it very much (except for the Duke Ellington / John Coltrane version of “In A Sentimental Mood,” which I have always loved) but I have been learning some standards on piano. “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” are two of my favorites. Ballads, mostly. They actually sound good to me, and I now believe that is what matters in music. It's amazing that I once didn't.
I’ve always been jealous of my friends who didn’t have these sort of experiences or associations with jazz. They can dabble with it, put it on casually, take or leave it as they please. They’re like Americans who develop a passing interest in Buddhism (cultural appropriation possibilities and all.) But for me, jazz is still mixed up with that old sense of normativity, with that great Should, and I don’t think it can ever be fully extricated. It will always be the soundtrack to that period of my life, with all its pressure and self-doubt.
Maybe the lesson here is that we need to avoid conflating particulars with abstractions. Jazz isn't freedom - not inherently. Nor is it slavery. Like everything else, it is neither and it is both. It is nothing more or less than what it is experienced to be.
It is what it is, you know?
***
1 Not his real name, mostly because making up names is fun. It does fit him, though.
2 This was just the most basic level of names. As you advanced, the names you were required to drop in order to secure your place in the hierarchy became more and more obscure.
3 If you have, you’re either my friend Peter or you’re hate-reading this.
4 I even wrote my school’s Very Serious Research Paper, the infamous “Senior Essay”, about it. Twenty-five pages, entitled “In Defense of Pop Music.” One part vindication of a marginalized art form; one part giddiness that I got to use the word “fuck” in a school paper and list Lil Wayne in my Works Cited page (in flawless MLA format, of course.)
5 Some people may object to calling Arcade Fire “pop.” I’m pretty sure none of them are in Arcade Fire, and since there’s like fifty people in that band, that’s a pretty good sample size. Also, I’ve never been clear on whether it’s “the” Arcade Fire or not. I feel like it’s a Berenstain Bears / Mandela effect type of situation, where everyone conspired to change it at some point and didn't tell me.
6 This is not a gender-neutral “he.” There is definitely a fair amount of patriarchy and sexism in the jazz community. Women are singers and occasionally Smurfette-like tokens.
7 My favorite comparison has always been to the Protestant Reformation, which started out as a valid critique of the absurdities of Catholicism, but didn’t take long to become even more dogmatic and intolerant (which is undeniably the case today - look at which one of those sects accepts the theory of evolution.)
8 And about whom I could write a whole separate - equally long, equally cathartic - piece.
1 Not his real name, mostly because making up names is fun. It does fit him, though.
2 This was just the most basic level of names. As you advanced, the names you were required to drop in order to secure your place in the hierarchy became more and more obscure.
3 If you have, you’re either my friend Peter or you’re hate-reading this.
4 I even wrote my school’s Very Serious Research Paper, the infamous “Senior Essay”, about it. Twenty-five pages, entitled “In Defense of Pop Music.” One part vindication of a marginalized art form; one part giddiness that I got to use the word “fuck” in a school paper and list Lil Wayne in my Works Cited page (in flawless MLA format, of course.)
5 Some people may object to calling Arcade Fire “pop.” I’m pretty sure none of them are in Arcade Fire, and since there’s like fifty people in that band, that’s a pretty good sample size. Also, I’ve never been clear on whether it’s “the” Arcade Fire or not. I feel like it’s a Berenstain Bears / Mandela effect type of situation, where everyone conspired to change it at some point and didn't tell me.
6 This is not a gender-neutral “he.” There is definitely a fair amount of patriarchy and sexism in the jazz community. Women are singers and occasionally Smurfette-like tokens.
7 My favorite comparison has always been to the Protestant Reformation, which started out as a valid critique of the absurdities of Catholicism, but didn’t take long to become even more dogmatic and intolerant (which is undeniably the case today - look at which one of those sects accepts the theory of evolution.)
8 And about whom I could write a whole separate - equally long, equally cathartic - piece.
