Understanding Jazz Essays - Jazz Genres, African-American Music

Understanding Jazz Understanding Jazz A mellow vibration lingers throughout a smoke-filled room, as eloquent music escapes the callused fingers of relaxed musicians. The tempo speeds up and grows into a fusion of spontaneous and uneven chords, exploding with rhythmic soul and life. The sound of jazz embraces the room. Jazz is primarily a dazzling, spellbinding, introspective beauty. The musician and the listener find they can derive meaning from the music. The music exists first, and its meaning is defined later. When a jazz musician is improvising, he is spontaneously composing, and at that moment his music is completely subjective. He must imagine the future in his music. He cannot transcend the subjectivity of the improvisation because it is created while it is being played. Every performance is new, giving it a fresh and exciting twist. Life cascades from the music, giving it emotion. The audience can feel the depression of the blues, the hype of swing, the funk of bebop and hard bop, and the dazzle of numerous instruments. The coolness of jazz invades and captures the mind with brilliant originality. Jazz is the future of itself. What that means is that within each improvisation there the entire body of black music --- ancient to the present --- is at work. Jazz exists only in the present, be cause it is like Heraclitus' river --- it can never be played exactly the same way twice. If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings of what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existential art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as Eric Dolphy claimed: I'll never leave jazz. I've put too much of myself into jazz already, and I'm still trying to dig in deeper. Besides, in what other field could I get so complete a scope to self-expression? To me, jazz is like part of living, like walking down the street and reacting to what you see and hear. And whatever I do react to, I can say immediately in my music. The other thing that keeps me in jazz is that jazz continues to move on. There are so many possibilities for growth inside jazz because it changes as you change (Dolphy, liner notes, Far Cry, December 21, 1960). The subjective quality to jazz is explored most successfully in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Sartre describes how Roquentin first feels when he hears the old Path? jazz record, played with a sapphire needle. He describes the notes as living as ephemerons, and then dying before the listener. It is almost sacrificial: For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh (Sartre, 21). After Roquentin heard the jazz record, there is silence and he realizes in the existential event which has just taken place that the Nausea has disappeared. He says: When the voice would heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish (22). What he feels at that moment is the connection between his own humanity and the music on the jazz record. When she sings, he understands all at once, in what Charlie Parker called an epiphany, that existence and the ability to make choices is very brief, and then dies. The second time he hears the record, he only hears it for a moment, and the feeling returns: Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity (174). The suffering Sartre describes is eliminated by the jazz, the act of listening to the