November 5, 2007
jazz for squares
Somewhat related to the previous post: one of the ways in which improv has blown my mind is that it’s showed me new ways to think about music. I really didn’t think that was going to happen anymore. It’s not that I thought I was never going to be surprised or delighted by music again, but I figured my templates for dealing with it were pretty much set.
I am not a jazz guy. I like it and appreciate it but for the most part have not been much moved by it, and since music is for me primarily an emotional experience, if I don’t feel it I don’t get it.
A couple of weeks ago, inspired by watching Bird, I downloaded the Massey Hall concert. For non-jazz fans: this is a live recording of a quintet consisting of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. It’s difficult to convey the accumulated weight of those names, but suffice to say this is the all-star jazz team of all time.
So I’m listening to it like I usually do jazz, which is to say a little distantly, and “Night in Tunisia” is playing, and at the end there’s a moment where they go back into the main theme of the song, and I had this flash of them as improvisers. I wasn’t thinking about the music as an abstract entity, I was thinking about five people on stage paying close attention to what everyone else is doing and playing, and jazz suddenly made sense to me. Thank you, improv!
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