Finding jazz, and finding feeling

A post about learning how to listen to music again without litigation or judgment. Alt: A post about taking music back from the utility over feeling.

I’ve never been much of a music guy, but jazz is slowly changing that.

I think the first time I listened to it without thinking “ugh, music for old/lame people” was in university, where I got exposed to a stereotypical “beats to layer with RainyMood” playlist on YouTube, and thought “Okay, yeah, there’s something here.” There were brief dabbles with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, but eventually finding “Chillhop” and having that serve as music to work alongside.

Years later, after working for a music label (despite still, not being into music that much), I find Hank Mobley. I don’t exactly remember how, but Spotify took that small foothold into hard bop and pried.

I like instrumental music, because I’m mostly able to use it as a soundtrack to what I’m writing. Even as I write this, I’ve got something going. In the past, I defaulted to Philip Glass, because his music is repetitive (on purpose), strong, and structured purposefully.¹

Specifically, it’s to evoke a long-dead feeling that I still chase: isolation, focus, being drilled into just writing. This usually happened late at night, and was something that I relied on to get my feet under me when it came to my portfolio. I needed to make that output happen, and I needed something to lubricate the process.

But now is different. Jazz feels different.

Blue Giant: Chapter 43 by Shinichi Ishizuka, published in Big Comic

I still chase that feeling, but I’m starting to have music be its own presence in my life, rather than a utility I’m accessing to get somewhere else. There’s probably a lot to be written about this kind of consuming of music: the “turn on a playlist with no unity or cohesiveness, and never actually pay attention to song names, musicians, or who might be playing.”

I’m making more of an effort to pause and recognize who is playing what; I’m not forcing it, like I would say if I was trying to make this into a project. I’m trying to be more mindful, in the moment, and appreciative of the sacrifices it took to make this music.

This was aided and abetted by diving into Blue Giant², a manga about jazz and the dreams of its protagonist to be an amazing jazz saxophone player. In manga terms, it reads very similar to someone discovering a sport for the first time: they have this moment of “I love [thing]” and the pursuit is almost simple-minded until the necessary growth makes them mature.

Maybe that’s the same journey I’m taking right now: the “I like this, I’m going to keep appreciating this” until I actually start learning.

A couple things interest me about jazz, and I wanted to organize them below:

On many albums, you’ll hear “false starts”, “alternate takes” or general “this wasn’t coming out the way we wanted. Stop, start again. Or just cut it.” I find this kind of roughness and completeness to the creative process pretty amazing because it’s easy to forget how much messing up goes into any creative pursuit; it also reminds us how important it is to have flow, chemistry, and spark.

Its inclusion is a testament to reminding us of the chaos of jazz — its ability to go from off-the-rails to back on in a moment. I’m not even really talking about the stereotypical “oh it’s Free Jazz, it’s just people playing randomly and you can’t make heads or tails of it.” Learning about how jazz musicians will communicate with each other during a song to give a musician “their time” to solo, or needing to reign in someone a bit lost to their own emotions feels… strange, considering what I’m used to.

Yeah, of course, guitar solos in rock exist, but I’m fascinated by the idea of different egos ebbing, flowing and improvising in real time to what I feel is a greater degree. It feels rare when a rock band suddenly just drops a whole other verse out of a song that you know has a specific structure; with jazz I feel that I’m likely to hear much more variation in how people play the same thing.

Feeding into this, I also like the idea of a jazz standard (a song which are essentially popular or prominent enough songs that musicians are expected to have in their repertoire). In an effort to find a better definition of a jazz standard than Wikipedia, I found this article:

In order to shake hands with older jazz cats on the bandstand, you kind of need to know most of these 90 songs, partly because they might get dismissive if they call more than two or three standards in a row that you can’t instantly play.

In my experience, once you learn 10 or 20 of them, the rest go easy. In the end, they are very similar, so all your brain needs to learn are the differences. After learning 50, almost any other standard can be learned in real time. You will never have to say, “I don’t know it,” again.

Serious jazz composers like Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk, and Wayne Shorter are different. Those pieces can’t be “faked.” But it’s no big deal to learn the general outline of a standard on the spot and omit a few details along the way. Indeed, “faking it” is probably an esoteric kind of skill that helps prove that you are a professional.³

The idea that one can write a song that just permeates a culture and becomes a cornerstone of every jazz artist is incredible. While other genres have covers, and other genres certainly play collaboratively, I find the mix of improvisational “we’re playing this, keep up kid” very interesting.

Hearing someone play “Stella By Starlight” by Miles Davis (with Coltrane/Evans) versus The Cannonball Adderly Quintet versus Stan Getz makes me think a lot about context. What were they like at that specific time in their lives? What tastes informed the changing of tempo, keys, styles or instruments?

I think for me, context leads to connection.

Blue Giant: Chapter 33 by Shinichi Ishizuka, published in Big Comic

A lot of musicians in general are flawed people, and that doesn’t stop here. Drunks, wife-beaters, sexists, junkies, abusers, Lotharios, and every other vice under the sun is represented in jazz musicians — many of them the “greats.” It forces a certain degree of empathy, and a certain degree of self-awareness to examine who is playing and why. Learning more about individuals lets you inform yourself about their styles, and lets you speculate about what they were bringing to the stage; it might be wrong, but it’s an exercise in your own morals, your own ideals, and your own ability to feel.⁴

It also feels important when a musician’s vices doesn’t affect the music, because it feels like a certain reverence or passion is almost overpowering the bottle of vodka or the injection of heroin. I have no way of knowing if that “the artist is making this work” feeling is honest or just a clever bit of masking. I just know that my love of pro wrestling makes me familiar with having the moral argument of “this person is/was a piece of shit, but damn they were/are good, and they almost make me forget.”

I’m not sure if I’m just suffering from the newbie “I don’t know what I don’t know” syndrome, but I feel it’s personal progress to want to give myself into the enjoyment, and not get caught up in the complex moral argument. For now, especially when I’m trying to find my own rhythm, I can allow myself the freedom to explore.

So I am. Even just to play with the feeling of enjoyment, rather than rushing to litigate.

Blue Giant: Chapter 40 by Shinichi Ishizuka, published in Big Comic

I messaged someone on X to someone who I would consider much more well-read on jazz than I am, mostly because I found it hard to know where and how to find that foundation. I wanted to know more from an academic perspective, here, mostly because I wanted to speak with more confidence beyond my own emotions.

His response was pretty simple: “listen, figure out whether someone playing on the song is interesting, then see where else they played, or what they’ve released.” I feel like I’ve maybe lost this skill set from when I was a teenager, where I probably thought that the music that I loved was “my life” and something that I lived, fully.

Again, part of this exploration is the switching from music as a tool to music as part of the self. I think that a lot of my thinking about connection and the Internet (“a tool vs the self”) comes from this phrasing, mostly because of

Katherine Dee

’s work. What am I trying to make music work at for me, rather than just experiencing it?

The first jazz song that really hit me was McCoy Tyner’s “Inception”, and I was actually pretty scared of the unfamiliar feeling of loving music. I felt this sequence of thoughts, scared that this song wasn’t obscure enough, or was “beginner’s jazz”, or that my appreciation of it would “say something” about something I was exploring. My brain lept ahead to getting shut down or pushed away from people who I’d want to share this enthusiasm with.

But the more I listened, the more that faded. Tyner’s piano hits you like a wall for the first 37 seconds of the recording. It’s precise in its repetition. You can tell that it takes restraint and dedication to enforce a uniformity to those parts. Layers. Something just had me listening to that first intro (after which I’d say it changes to “more typical” jazz, by my imperfect definitions). I don’t play piano, but I could feel that power imagining myself playing.

I don’t feel that often. I don’t usually consider patterns, technicalities, emotions in music to the extent that I’m examining as much as I’m feeling. So I’m letting it take hold, and steering me to places that feel just as good, if not better. It’s practice at letting myself be more open, vulnerable and free. It’s taking me away from a mindset of commodification, or “needing [thing] to saying [things] about me.” I realize the irony of saying something is “for me” while writing about it publicly, but I’ll say I’m still working on that.

This change is good and welcome. And I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

1. My music vocabulary is still very shallow. I find it similar to tasting tea: you don’t know the words to describe specificity. “Grassy” is not the same as “straw.”

2. Blue Giant is availble in English via its recent film, and via omnibus format. This Amazon link is not an affiliate link. You can read Blue Giant scanlations on MangaDex, but this is a pirate/unofficial release, and I’d recommend paying money for the officials as a way of supporting a niche title if you can.

3. https://ethaniverson.com/deepening-your-relationship-to-musical-theatre/

4. There’s a dozens-long list of “jazz artists who were heroin addicts” https://rateyourmusic.com/list/headphonian/jazz-artists-who-were-heroin-addicts/2/