Skip to content
Capture It In Words
Menu
  • My Writing
  • Resume
  • Blog
  • Contact
Menu

And All that Jazz

Posted on April 1, 2015July 12, 2015 by amelia admin

I recently, with the assistance of my good friend Sarah, unearthed a personal penchant  for jazz.

yup, all dat jazz

I’ve always loved Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Casablanca  – I didn’t even know it was “jazz.”

But heck! I loved it anyway! You can appreciate Monet without knowing he was an Impressionist, or even that he was French. It gives you a buzz, that’s what matters.

All the same, its food to know Monet is French. Knowing about jazz doesn’t  heightens my listening experience,  but  the culture the term brings with it, the unification of human beings of all eras, the controversy over the keeping and breaking of traditions, deepens it.

For starters, just Wikipedia. You’ll find offshoots of the culture including be-bop, fusion, postbop, traditional jazz, and connections to genres like bluegrass. It’s a new world folks full of all kinds of styles, not just an old man scatting to a bass line in Harlem.

Get this: in jazz, you don’t stare at sheet music the whole time you play! You don’t play just what the composer wrote down, the pesky notes, the specific rhythms. I play Gershwin and I play him by reading 32 pages of black and white. The jazz musician plays by following his heart.

I leave you folks with the image of a lone sax player standing on the corner of the sidewalk with nothing but his sax and the trills and doodles flying from it and the exhortation to follow in his footsteps.

Liberate yourselves from sheet music.

Be free and lift your fingers to play not Bach nor Brahms nor Beethoven, but

“all that jazz.”

-AR

 

 

Post Views: 1,559

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Amelia

Amelia Rasmusen Buzzard is a freelance writer. She graduated in 2021 from Hillsdale College summa cum laude with degrees in philosophy and German and currently resides in upstate New York.

Follow her Substack for gritty essays on Christianity and womanhood.

© 2025 Capture It In Words | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme