The thought bubbled up randomly, as all thoughts do. Perhaps this puts jazz in opposition to the Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert thrust of Classical music: incredible music but not risky anymore. Performances, recordings, and interpretations of e.g. Mozart have been homogenized so as to embalm the legendary composer. As if a musical vision of Mozart’s strength could not withstand a risky interpretation — sad! The forces behind this embalming are the usual ones — economics and institutions, plus the passage of time. These same forces are at play in the jazz world, and there is moreover a conscious effort to embalm jazz too. Preserve the tradition, arrange it in the museum of cultural consciousness. From within jazz, the embalmers fly the flag of “authenticity;” how dare you play _______ when you haven’t firmly established your mastery of (conservative) bebop? But the embalmers are doomed, for jazz is a gambler’s music.
Mozart’s main deliverable was the score. Fairly immutable written music that enables performance and interpretation but does not contain them. He wrote code but didn’t provide the interpreter; recipes without the cook. The greatest recipes ever can still be McDonald’s-ified. Plus, Mozart never could have predicted the advent of recording technology. To all non-musicians, trust me on this: it is generally a far more gratifying experience to play Mozart than to merely hear it, even when you suck at playing. It is like cooking and eating simultaneously, but also like communing with the elegant god of geometry and the sensual god of rhythmic tactile experience. All that said, sheet music is no longer a scalable or approachable consumer product. And there’s nothing wrong with listening to recordings — shadows they may be, but still mighty and lovely. Nonetheless, there is much more to the total Classical Music experience than clicking PLAY and chillin’ out.
Jazz players get this. In fact, I can trace back many of the aesthetic and economic failures of jazz to the simple fact that playing jazz is generally way more fun than listening to it, especially listening with an untrained ear. I really wish we could all admit this and just split inward- versus outward-facing jazz. But what is the source of that fun? It cannot be just indulgence in the real-time audio outcome of the music, for then recordings would be just as fun and easier, too: a strict upgrade. Part of the answer has to do with the social/conversational aspect of jazz. The high barrier to entry, steep difficulty curve, and technical sophistication of jazz relative to other musics attract introverts and nerds running autistic personality modules. This kind of person is probably not destined to be a social butterfly, and yet the sensitivity and nuance of improvisational music scratches the social itch all humans possess. The social side of playing music with friends without any consideration of audience or outcome is consistently underrated, I think.
But there is another source of jazz fun. It is the danger — the gamble. The mad dance of the dice, the twist of fate riding on the river card. Will she stick the landing? Will this note work? Where am I in the form? If you don’t see the fun in that, stay away from jazz and from Las Vegas. But either way, as with the social-fun-aspect, outsiders face a problem. It’s not fun to watch someone else play Blackjack. It’s even less fun if you don’t know the rules! Herein lies a paradox: as jazz musicians, we work hard to come off as suave and professional, to minimize mistakes, to play with confidence and poise; but overly-perfect jazz erases the blazing excitement of the dangerous gamble: the can’t-tear-your-eyes-away; the gut-wrench as the acrobat flies across the stage; the incredulity-plus-admiration when someone pulls off the impossible.
And yet, it would be incredibly lame to begin a concert with a disclaimer: “What we’re about to do is gonna be really hard, we promise! We could mess up at any moment!” It has to be implicitly detectable: an unspoken undercurrent of probabilistic tension; a source of ever-increasing heat. A few suggestions for makin’ it happen:
Clarity. Sharp lines, homophony, togetherness. Nothing like a good rest to remind the audience “we’re making all of this happen right now!” Unison work counteracts noisy entropy. Entropic free jazz has its place, and may well reflect some thermodynamic truth of the universe, but it’s not nearly as dangerous, subversive, or delicate as we delude ourselves into thinking.
Discipline. “There are no mistakes in jazz.” — fuck off; nobody actually thinks that. Every mistake, especially every mistake that is not retroactively contextualized (a jazz superpower), imparts a cost on the listener. It tarnishes the glow, reminds us a bit too much of the fallibility of the musicians. But of course, as mentioned earlier, flawless jazz is usually conservative, safe jazz. The deepest balance is circumvent a dense thicket of possible mistakes: give the audience the impression that anything but what you are playing would suck. You don’t want to be merely plucking the prettiest flower in the garden, nor selecting the least of many evils. Be like the figure-skater whose elegance belies the fact that a tiny imperfection would unfurl into a catastrophe.
Virtuosity. Ironically, not a virtue on its own. Shredding is tiresome, emotionless precision is basically worthless. At least we tell ourselves that — partially to shield our egos and partially because it’s true. But equally true is that technique is easy to admire, and executing something extremely far outside of the layman’s abilities is impressive. Music is not meant to be just impressive — if that’s it, you’re doomed to the realm of the shallow and vapid — but impressive shit elevates musicians towards that transcendent, ever-so-slightly-superhuman position that makes them celebrities. Virtuosity is a non-inconsequential appeal of Art Tatum, and the dearth of virtuosity holds back Vijay Iyer even though it seems like he probably has some good ideas.
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Again and again, a paradox viciously grins at us from deep within the churning heart of music. We strive to give the impression that we are escaping the laws of probability over and over. That it could go horridly south at any moment, but never does. Confidence in the face of danger. Bet it all on black.
Jazz is a gambler’s music. Unfreezable, unkillable, unpredictable. Keep it that way, and show it off!