The painting used for the cover of Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah-Um
More so than other forms,
jazz always stood almost monolithically in this opacity to me. With little idea of where to
start and how to find something I would respond to, my early forays were difficult and unsuccessful. I knew that this music was
crucial, something that my own intellectual development required as a person concerned with the history of music, especially popular American music (I am
using pop music very loosely as a catchall term for the equally nebulous
concept of mass cultural music, that is music intended for a wide audience and
music that has come about during a period where it was easy to disseminate
recorded sound to a general audience). However, there was so much and the music
often dense and more complex than a 3 or 4-minute song that my initial attempts
were always short lived. I made brief attempts in the first years of college,
attempts that seem hilarious in retrospect because I was just trying way too
hard. The time I stayed home from a party and decorated my bedroom with
Christmas lights and read Nathanial West while trying to listen to Kind of Blue is most prominent in my mind.
Still, even with all of these intellectual ornaments, the music never clicked.
Nathaniel West clicked (by the way, all of you should read Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the
Locust if you have not done so), but not Miles Davis. In short, I didn’t
get jazz and it bothered me.
Move forward about ten
years from those early and clumsy attempts, and we are at a point where this music
would finally register with me. I am not sure what changed, if my boredom with
much of the new music coming out led me to seek out challenging works from
unfamiliar eras or if I just heard enough stuff influenced by jazz to finally
start making sense of what I was hearing. Either way, it finally clicked and I
began to find what I was seeking 10 years ago and then some. This music hit me
in a big way and I am still discovering my passion for it.
Jazz is, to me, is the
definitive form of 20th century American music. As much as we
champion “Americana” today, what we end up with is watered down and saccharine
folk music that is as boring as it is pointless. Jazz, while equally filled
with its mediocre moments, is a much larger part of American music than it
sometimes seems. What I hope to achieve over the next several weeks is to
look at some of the cornerstone recordings and offer an introduction to this
seemingly unassailable musical form. By the end, my goal is to give the novice
something I did not necessarily have, an easily digestible run down of the
major works, where to start, and what is important about them. This gives me an
opportunity to not only learn more but to help others avoid my clumsy
beginnings (cannot help with your decorating choices, some of you might still
think Christmas lights are a good idea).
For now, I am opening up
this column to any recommendations for albums to cover or any resources you may
have found useful in your exploration of jazz. Personally, I have found the
Bluenote app on Spotify to be incredibly informative in providing context and
recommendations for lesser known artists.
Come back next week, when I will be
discussing the most clichéd jazz record recommendation one could give, Miles
Davis’ Kind of Blue. For now, I leave you with
the masterful “Open Letter to the Duke,” by Charles Mingus. That sax line kills
me every time.
