On Jazz

There was a time when I liked the idea of jazz more than the music itself. To my untrained and mostly unexposed ear, it always sounded like a disorganised explosion of notes coming from a collaboration of spirited musicians all wanting to do their own thing in spite of one another. Everything I heard as a child, from my Mom's easy listening to my Dad's classical, made melodic sense to my ear. And I understood and appreciated music in general, even spending many years as a piano student with the Royal Conservatory of Music.

In my twenties, I made several concerted attempts to get excited about jazz because to me it was the soundtrack of the charismatic urban existence that decorated my dreams upon moving to Ontario from Labrador just after high school. But I was too much of an ingenue who fell into a state of awe at the turn of every new corner to take any of it seriously. And this was before I even made it outside of Welland's city limits! And just as I couldn't picture myself finding my way around any city with a population greater than the 12,000 back home, I also couldn't properly navigate this complex musical genre. I kept getting tripped up in the mosaic of seemingly unrelated sounds set to a seemingly arbitrary beat that my foot just couldn't seem to follow.

This curious mystification simmered inside of me and has only approached maturity recently. I found myself increasingly seeking out 91.1 Jazz FM, easily intrigued by Ella Fitzgerald and Emilie-Claire Barlow, Oscar Peterson and Frank Sinatra. But it wasn't until I joined the audience of a Ravi Coltrane concert at Brock University several months ago that I learned to really love the style of jazz I mentioned above.

I became drawn in by the passion of the performers, their obvious rapport, their confidence and masterful manipulation of the instruments, their ability to interpret the music as it was being woven. The musician who really made an impression on me was the young man who pivoted on his heels as he danced with his double bass, his raven dreadlocks falling parallel with the strings that were being devoured by his fingers like five-legged spiders. During the post concert interview and question period, his quiet manner free from arrogance was appealing and further revealed himself as a dedicated musician.

During this same interview, Ravi Coltrane talked about how "jazz is not about imitation". He acknowledged that borrowing the standards and learning them note for note, and striving to play in the exact same style as one's idol is an important step in learning the genre. But that eventually, a musician should be courageous enough to venture out on his own to craft something that nobody has ever heard before, trusting that his own voice and ingenuity will resonate with and captivate the audience.

These days, I listen to jazz because I love its intricacies and I believe it is some of the best music for dancing, etc. Even amidst the standards, I frequently pull something new out of it...  and I still become entranced by Coltrane's air of sophistication, even if my foot doesn't always find the beat.