Then There's Jazz

My personal journey and how to start yours

I don’t like to categorize music into genres. I think it’s a shortcut, a device grounded in emotional and intellectual laziness. 

In one of his best-known essays titled “Keep your identity small”, Paul Graham wrote that the reason why subjects like religion or politics never lead to fruitful arguments is that they are deeply ingrained into people’s identities. People can’t think clearly about them and get into religious wars in their defense, because it’s as if they’re defending themselves. So, he continues, “all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible”. An identity is like a definition, a label, and ”the more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you”, he concludes.

Saying that a piece is Rhythm & Blues or Country or Bluegrass is like giving music a certain identity, leading many to be interested in it only because it has that identity. If I can’t stand Bluegrass, I won’t hear any of it, no matter how interesting and beautiful some pieces within that genre may be. Genres kill exploration, a fundamental activity of music discovery.

To me, there are only two types of music: good music and bad music. And that should be assessed after the fact, not prior.

Then there’s Jazz. 

In the words of pianist Bill Evans, Jazz is not a style but a process of making music. “It’s the process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time”. 

What does that mean? Jazz is a creative process based on improvisation and spontaneity. In a way, it is a revival of what went on in classical music in the 17th century, when musicians improvised what they were playing in the moment. Then, because there was no way of making music permanent and transferable in space and time, like with today’s electronic recordings, they started writing it down. So what used to be one role (the musician playing music in the moment, improvising), split into two roles (the composer/writer of the music and the interpreter of the music). Gradually, the writing and the interpretation of the writing replaced improvisation, which became a lost art in classical music. 

In a sense, we could say that in the 17th century, prior to written music, classical musicians were playing Jazz. In the 20th century, Jazz resurrected that process of improvisation and spontaneity.

This is why Jazz players make one minute’s music in one minute’s time: it’s as if they composed music by playing it, on the spot. They improvise, make music in real time by following a harmonic structure, whereas composers can take three months to compose one minute of music. Jazz is playing the same piece a thousand times and making it different each and every one of them, it’s total creative liberty to go places on top of an agreed-upon harmonic backbone. 

“I’ll play it and tell you what it is later”, Miles Davis’ spoken line that can be heard at the beginning of “If I were a bell”, summarizes this concept beautifully.

As the essence of Jazz, improvisation is also its most fascinating aspect. It speaks to the utmost creativity and mastery: you can’t improvise in a meaningful and creative way if you don’t have a total technical fluency of the instrument you’re playing, if moving your hands on it isn’t the natural translation of your thoughts and feelings in that very moment. This explains why Jazz musicians are virtuosos, absolute masters of their instrument -- exceptionally talented musicians aspire to play Jazz, not pop songs.

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When Perry made me listen to ‘Round About Midnight that afternoon of many years ago, I had no idea who Miles Davis was. But I listened, without caring about whether that was Rock & Roll or Soul or whatever. I listened without prejudice. 

I was seventeen, naive, and overly worried about what others thought of me. Perry (not a fantasy name -- he really exists) was a saxophone player. Smart, smooth, well-read and tremendously knowledgeable of all things music, he was several years my senior, with many gigs already under his belt as part of a Jazz quintet. I looked up to him as someone whose style I wanted to make my own. Someone who doesn’t interrupt and waits before speaking and says just the right words, someone who knows how to articulate why a piece of music is good or bad, someone who has good taste. I would spend hours just hanging around at his place. Sometimes he would put on a record for me and disappear upstairs to practice. He would leave with a “Listen to this, then tell me what you think”. An hour or so later he’d return, sax hanging from his neck, with a “So, what did it do to you?”.

What did it do to you? Such a beautiful question. Such an enormous question. From Perry and that particular period of my life I learned that good musical taste is not something we’re born with, but something that we develop and nurture over time. And that this process is largely influenced by our life experiences and the people we decide to be surrounded with. Had I not been guided by him to train my ear a certain way, perhaps my taste would have developed in a different direction. Who knows?  

I remember I had a gigantic amount of respect for those who knew and liked Jazz, and I was determined to develop an appreciation for it. I wanted to learn to like Jazz. 

The weird thing that kicked off this whole journey for me, though, was that I wanted to learn to like Jazz not because I was interested in that type of music per se, but because I liked the people who liked it. I wanted to be like them. I thought that those who felt so natural to like such an apparently difficult and convoluted music belonged to an elite of intellectually superior people, a minority who could hear beauty behind confusion, a tribe of sophisticated savants with unattainable knowledge. But I needed a guide, someone who would point me towards the right players and the right records. And Perry was the perfect conduit: he made my motive switch from mere emulation to real interest.   

It was the beginning of July, there was no school, and Perry was mostly home studying and practicing. So I figured I’d take advantage. “Ok, let’s do this:” he said, “one record a day, and by the end of the month you will have listened to thirty of my all-time favorite Jazz records”. I was thrilled. 

So, the day after ‘Round About Midnight by Miles Davis, he fed me Kind Of Blue. Again, by Miles Davis. After that, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, then Waltz For Debby by Bill Evans, then Somethin’ Else by Cannonball Adderley, then Saxophone Colossus by Sonny Rollins. Ending week one with Time Out by Dave Brubeck. 

As the days went by with Jazz in my ears, I was overwhelmed. The funny thing is that he just made me listen to these records without mentioning the author and title, and without any interference from his side. Sometimes two or three times in a row. “Try to listen while doing something else, don’t be concentrated on what’s playing; listen casually, in a relaxed mode”, he would say. Then, starting week two, he asked me which day’s music from the prior week I liked best, and why. I didn’t know what to say, but I tried to articulate something. I wanted to be true to myself and decipher what that experience really did to me. So I said that Tuesday felt good, because the music fit my mood and I kind of understood where it was going. In other words, I found it easy to follow and at times I could even anticipate what would come next. “Does it make sense?”, I asked. “Totally”, he replied. And went on to explain that if it felt good, that’s all that matters. “You know,” he continued, “without knowing it, you picked what’s overwhelmingly considered the number one Jazz record in history: Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. I won’t go into the details of why right now, but that’s a great sign for your Jazz education”. I was happy, and onto something.

Week two was all about making my listening experience more conscious and meaningful. Perry would introduce a record to me and give me homework. “When you listen, pay attention to what the bassist is doing and how that interacts with the drummer” was his first guideline. Bass and drums are the structural foundation of any piece: learning how to isolate the bass is key when you’re unsure of where the music is going, or when you’re kind of lost. And so I started to pay attention. I got assigned a few more iconic records, like Out To Lunch by Eric Dolphy, Blame It On My Youth by Art Farmer, Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock, and Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus. At the end of the week I couldn’t choose one album that I liked best, as they all sounded great. “That’s another good sign”, said Perry. I was making progress.

In week three I learned about tension and release, and how to recognize basic turnarounds. Jazz is all about creating tension and releasing it through harmonic structures called turnarounds, i.e., a series of chord changes that lead a piece to its next section. It’s hard to describe them in words: you have to train your ears to recognize them. The more you listen to Jazz records, the better you get at this. A basic listening rule of thumb is to pay attention to how a section ends and the next starts -- usually, right there, you have a number of chords to “turn the piece around” and resolve the tension going into the next section. Why is this important? Because usually over turnarounds you hear good things, like a pleasant harmonic sequence or an interesting part of a solo. For this, I had to listen to, among others, The Complete Blue Note Recordings by Thelonious Monk and The Complete Savoy And Dial Studio Recordings by Charlie Parker. “Are you still fired up by Jazz after this last week?”, asked Perry, knowing how difficult all that would be for anyone just three weeks into it. It was like learning a new language. I was exhausted, a little lost, but ready to charge ahead.

Week four was about modern Jazz. “Now that you have the building blocks in place, you can start listening to some new, more complex stuff”, as if what I just did wasn’t complex enough. And out came records by Weather Report, Steps Ahead, Jaco Pastorious, Yellowjackets, Pat Metheny, Esbjörn Svensson Trio, The Bad Plus and many others. Such unbelievable music -- I was stunned. The advent of electronics and new harmonic ideas made Jazz flourish in spectacular, unexpected ways. But one thing was abundantly clear: the basic principles of improvisation and spontaneity, of creating one minute’s music in one minute’s time, remained the same even as complexity increased exponentially.

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And so that’s how my Jazz induction went.

I guess at this point the question is: how do you build an appreciation for Jazz if you don’t have a friend like Perry by your side? Well, back then there was no Internet, and the only way to learn something was by having someone teach that to you, or going about it on your own through trial and error. So I was lucky to start my journey the way I did. Today it’s a totally different story.

If you have a genuine interest, there are a number of things you can do to approach the immense world of Jazz and increase the odds that you won’t throw in the towel after just a few days:

1. Give yourself a present and buy The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings. This 1600-page reference book is known as the world’s leading guide to Jazz and it’s “a mine of fascinating information and insightful, often wittily trenchant, criticism”. Every single Jazz record ever made is reviewed and given a score. Out of the thousands of records reviewed, only a handful get a crown, which is the highest designation. Only twenty of them have received a crown in all the nine editions of the guide published so far. So, you may want to start with getting those twenty records and, one by one, listening to them. These are considered the best of the best by the guide, not necessarily by you (although chances are you too will find them awesome -- if that’s the case, you’re on the right track). But it’s a good start. Take your time and try to see what they do to you. 

2. Read Miles, Miles Davis’ autobiography. Outstanding book. I read it three times, and each time I enjoyed it like the first. An innovator, Miles Davis was arguably the most famous Jazz trumpet player in music history. A controversial figure with a unique style, he had a career spanning 40 years, through which you can retrace the evolution of music from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. Reading his autobiography is like reading a book on the history of Jazz. You should dedicate particular attention to his quintets, known as “Great Quintets”. Miles was known as an extremely selective recruiter -- you had to be beyond outstanding to get a chance of being noticed by Miles, and maybe recruited to play with him. Over the years, all the greats cut their teeth by playing with Miles, so much so that being recruited by him was considered a baptism of fire, after which you had the power and notoriety to do whatever you wanted to. Just look at the names in the First Great Quintet (1955-59 -- often a Sextet), besides Miles: John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Philly Joe Jones (drums), with the addition of Cannonball Adderley (alto saxophone) to make it a sextet. “In mid-1958, Bill Evans replaced Garland on piano and Jimmy Cobb replaced Jones on drums, but Evans only remained for about six months, in turn replaced by Wynton Kelly as 1958 turned into 1959. This group backing Davis, Coltrane, and Adderley, with Evans returning for the recording sessions, recorded Kind of Blue, considered "one of the most important, influential and popular albums in Jazz"”. And the Second Great Quintet (1964-68), besides Miles: Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums), Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone). Each and every one of these names made Jazz history. You may want to check them all out. Again, take your time. Don’t rush into it. You’ll be busy for a while.

3. Subscribe to Downbeat magazine, the authority on all things Jazz since 1934. This should keep you up to date on recent developments and give you a sense of some of the most interesting new voices out there.

4. Go to live performances. Great Jazz clubs are pretty much everywhere in the world nowadays. There’s nothing like hearing live Jazz music and witnessing first hand the creative process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time.

5. Listen, listen, listen. Train your ears while feeding your heart and soul. Getting into Jazz is a never ending, life-changing experience that should be developed slowly, but regularly.   

Jazz isn’t a genre. It isn’t a style. Bill Evans said that it’s a process of making music, but I humbly and respectfully think that it’s much more than that: it's the state of mind needed to embrace that process. A universal language conceived to navigate the tiny, apparently insignificant details that make every bit of music different from its prior version based on an infinite number of factors. 

Approaching Jazz might feel like an intimidating feat, but it shouldn’t. Technical aspects aside, it’s important to learn to observe what the music does to you, and this can be done by anyone with an open heart. 

“I do not agree that the layman’s opinion is less of a valid judgment of music than that of a professional musician. In fact, I would often rely more on the judgment of a sensitive layman than that of a professional, since the professional, because of his constant involvement with the mechanics of music, must fight to preserve the naivete that the layman already possesses.” -- Bill Evans, 1966.