Why come back to jazz over and over again? You can get your fix of harmony from Wagner. Just about every musical culture east of Vienna focuses on improvisation. Get your blues from Blues.
An answer: *mystery*. It is for the same reason that we spin the roulette wheel, or pray in a language we do not understand, that we allow jazz to overcome our discontents and draw us in.
How exciting it must have been to attend a live performance of a yet-unrecorded up-and-comer back in the days when records were scarce! A generation later, the record-shop ritual: walk through the aisles, put out your antennae, let a good record come to you. Better yet, a recommendation from a salty patron a few paces over. You rush home, unburdened by your wallet, and spin the plate.
Then the quest begins: *let me find something to love*. Not every record can be expected to begin with its very best material! This is the fun game of appraising a recommendation: _why did they recommend this, anyway? What moment do I *need* to hear — on what are they betting their credibility?_
We chase the same magic when we improvise — this is a big part of _why_ we improvise — and indeed we expect the magic to tear through the clouds when, well, we are not actively expecting. The function of the multiple interlocking technical systems of jazz — harmony, rhythm, form — is not just to give the practitioners constraints and context to leverage; a listener subconsciously expects an ambient soup of digestible, familiar music as a background to the lightning-bolts of inspiration. It is a tradeoff that entropic free jazz has mismanaged, so that it is just another kind of ambient music. Another win for Duke Ellington.
OK, OK — but it's 2024, boomer. I'm not going to drink milk and read the newspaper and wait for the *good stuff* to lurch out at me! Give me the gold, straight to the dome. *Intravenous* triumphs of jazz improvisation.
Your back sags and you thumb open YouTube. "10 times John Coltrane went BEAST MODE" — the lotion's at arm's length... this is gonna be good.
But does it work? Consider a 24-hour looping video of 86,400 individual one-second clips of hot, bronze people orgasming with gusto. Does that work?
But why not? Seriously! Can we not refine centuries of musical tradition — a bush of tasty green leaves — into a fine powder, ripe for the nostril? Into a rock, as hard as it is potent? Why can't you, like, tritone-sub the tritone-sub, dude?
For crack-rock pornified YouTube jazz to work, it would have to repudiate millenia of music _as ritual_. The conservative answer is something along the lines of "it ain't broke, so don't fix it." The progressive answer is probably a valid complaint about a corporation stepping in as a profiteering drug dealer, a warning about frying your neurons and such. Neither answer satisfies me all the way; both seem right but a morbid curiosity eggs me on. Why _can't_ we pornify jazz? Why is jazz porn so bad?
Why can't I cut out those pesky repeats in the Mozart sonata?
Why can't I practice without warming up?
Why do I have to stand for the national anthem before the first pitch?
A question with no answer is an opportunity. But what if there is an answer, and you're just not ready to hear it?
This I fear. Did I debase my brain on the internet so that Sonny Rollins and I are now different species, neurologically speaking? Can I get it back — can I microdose equanimous 20th-century boredom and use a Thomas Guide until I swing *for real*? Or will the twirling currents of the time-river really force me to come up with something...*shudder*..._new?_
It's all a bit much. "I wonder what's happening in Ga—"
No!
Read Jaron Lanier. *Resist* the algorithm. You're not a mule — you shouldn't have a _feed_. The days of 'search,' as the main verb of the web, are numbered. So go ahead, search — seek, desire — do not let the sludge merely dribble into your open mouth. If you can't think of what to search, then don't search at all. Your inquisitiveness is your humanity. Slurping down the feed is hog-like. David Hume will be real pissed off at you — he will emerge as an apparition from a cloud of Philosophy 101 pot-smoke — if you outsource your goddarned _desires_ to a computer program whose aims are to make money!
The battle ain't gonna get any easier, either. Steel yourself now. It is good to retreat if Hell is the battlefield.
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I have a buncha saxophone posts brewin' too. One on the first big three: Hawk, Pres, and big boy Benny Webster, which should set the DNA-foundation for appraisals of Bird, Sonny, and Trane. The first three are Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander: a perfect algebraic trefoil, the structural basis for everything that follows. I guess that means Bird is Pikachu — perfect design, perfectly contained. You fill in the rest.