Whereas generally rock songs were recorded to be
a certain way and that’s the way people expect them to
be played, jazz is all about loose interpretations. No
doubt rock songs allow skilled musicians to make their
own re-harmonizations and variations, but it’s nothing
compared to jazz. Every time you play a jazz song, by
default it is your creation and it’s almost expected that
you will do whatever you very well please with it. A
few structural boundaries are set, and the rest is all up
to the musician’s imagination and skill. You would
never even think to reproduce exactly the way it was
rendered on someone else’s recording. Rhythm and
blues has this characteristic too, but the complexity of
jazz allows for expression that goes exponentially
beyond what is typically possible in rhythm and blues.
Jazz has the attitude and expressiveness of rock, with
the finesse and complexity of classical music.
In short, I have become an obsessive anew. And
there is a childish — even evangelical — deliberateness
about the newfound obsession, filling my phone with
strictly jazz tunes, only putting jazz on at home
whenever friends come over and watching YouTube
incessantly about jazz. Lovers of rock (or any other
type of music) may take exception to such pulpitizing
about jazz, and that’s fine. Life without infatuated,
irrational obsessions would be so much less interesting.
Especially when they don’t harm anyone. In his book
Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby wrote all about this kind of
obsession (in his case it was English football). In one
passage he says, “I have always been accused of taking
the things I love – football, of course, but also books
and records – much too seriously, and I do feel a kind
of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is
lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”
Pretty much.
I am content in this new obsessive bliss, and I
wouldn’t be the first one to remark that sometimes
you have to let go of the past in order to steam
towards the future. It’s like being a teenager all
over again; like being a part of one of the tribes
that existed in high school — in late eighties
Florida we had the surfers, the new wavers, the
skaters, the rappers, the metalers, the jocks, and so
forth and so on. While today it may be more
difficult to locate like-minded fellow tribe
members than when I was 17, in my own little
musical garden it’s beautiful to once again
daydream off about harmonic minor modes and
about flatted fifths as I do the dishes, wait in line
at the airport or invariably drift off in the middle
of a telephone conference.
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THE CONE - ISSUE #8 - WINTER 2016