I recently, with the assistance of my good friend Sarah, unearthed a personal penchant \u00a0for jazz.<\/p>\n
yup, all dat jazz<\/p>\n
I’ve always loved Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Casablanca \u00a0– I didn’t even know it was “jazz.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
All the same, its food to know Monet is French. Knowing about jazz doesn’t \u00a0heightens my listening experience, \u00a0but \u00a0the culture the term brings with it, the unification of human beings of all eras,\u00a0the controversy over the keeping and breaking of traditions, deepens it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Liberate yourselves from sheet music.<\/p>\n
Be free and lift your fingers to play not Bach nor Brahms nor Beethoven, but<\/p>\n
“all that jazz.”<\/p>\n
-AR<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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