The Jazz Dilemma: What is it, and why might it be worth talking about?

Back when MySpace was at the forefront of the social media race, an old college friend used to have a profile tagline that read “I’d rather be relevant than famous.” However, it could be argued that those who are famous are indeed relevant, as the energy behind and frequency within our conversations about them make them so. When we talk about them, I believe what we’re really engaged in is the exercise of either reinforcing or questioning the framework of our own values, but at a safe one-arm emotional distance. And more importantly, who our values seem to align with, and how we ultimately feel about that. Therefore, it can be argued that the sliding scale of a person’s relevance is tied to the amount in which we think we might benefit from having a conversation about them. So if you believe that relevance can be equated to usefulness, then this begs the question of “what is Jazz and why might it worth talking about?”

As we’ve already seen, and continue to see within the styles of Hip-Hop, Rock, R&B, Pop, etc., they provide the public with more obvious ways of incorporating their perceived value (for better or worse) towards their everyday lives, as it gives people content to converse with, sell stuff with, and share within the realms of fashion and speech patterns—all of which are just cultural symbols that people deploy to make it easier for other members of their “tribe” to identify them within crowds. That said, let’s take a quick look at one of the most pervasive forms of music to come about in roughly the last 40 years: Hip-Hop.

It has been said that never in a time throughout the documented history of music have large contingencies of people (especially the youth) ever chosen to identify themselves as being specific products of a musical movement like they do with Hip Hop (i.e. “I am Hip Hop,” “I live Hip Hop,” “I eat, breath, and sleep Hip Hop”). Now granted, during the formative years of Rock & Roll, and even Jazz for that matter, we find that it was also the youth who rallied behind these two movements as well, as they found that they could use certain aspects of the music as a means of validating, to varying degrees, the energy behind the types of opinions they held. However, the power of Hip Hop—which really has to do with America’s long-standing fascination with anything associated with black male youth—is that its aesthetic is now just as interwoven into the everyday fabric of our society as is Starbucks and Nike. So how does this relate to Jazz you might ask? With the way that Jazz is generally marketed and presented these days, coupled with an ever increasing audience that has no significant history of having tried their hand at playing music of any kind at a high level (unlike with sports), the public’s relationship to Jazz is generally one of indifference. However, when people do think about some Jazz that they may have liked, it may have been related to a vocalist, as this is one “instrument” that we’ve all tried practicing behind closed doors. And to further prove my point about the public’s general feeling of indifference towards Jazz, is that their point of consumption is usually within public spaces where the volume is low enough to talk over, thus further conditioning them to regard it as a piece of interior decoration that doesn’t require much of their attention. A perfect example of this would be when the Grammies had Esperanza Spaulding, of all people, performing as background music immediately following her upset over Justin Bieber for “Best New Artist” in 2011 while they made their announcements about the next artist to receive their awards. Could you imagine them having asked Jay-Z to perform while they announced the next award recipient? Clearly, the answer would be no. So as you can see, what Jazz needs is a total branding overhaul, where the public is taught how to interface with it like what has been done with the more popular genres. But in order to do so, it would need to be done in a way that still reflects the hidden values that have helped to sustain Jazz up until this point. So the first step in re-branding this music appropriately lies within an understanding of what it even is in the first place.  

            The word Jazz, like any other style of music, is merely a marketing term. No more, no less. After all, real musicians put their energy into trying to play what they hear, not what to call what they’re playing. It’s also important to remember that the word Jazz had already been in circulation before it was ever attached to a sound. So a fair etymological definition for Jazz would be that it’s a term that was used to describe popular American music at the turn of the 20th century, whose roots can be found in both the Blues and Ragtime music. And whereas the Blues is more akin to an African-American sensibility towards early “American” folk music, Ragtime is more reflective of Western European Classical music and its residual effects upon the types of early Marches that were composed by people such as John Philip Sousa. However, the important piece of connective tissue between the Blues and Ragtime is the application of the black aesthetic on both. Hence, when you combine these two styles, and run them through an early black filter, what you get is a distilled version of the type of Jazz that people such as Louis Armstrong helped champion. So while this information is all well and good, the question still remains as to what, if any, might be the usefulness of Jazz on our society and the world at large?

            The answer to the above question is that Jazz, like sports and politics, is just another structural model that can be used to evaluate the democratic nature of relationships. So when you learn how the instruments function independently and collectively, a mirror suddenly appears that allows you to gain some insight into how either you or someone else is being. This is no different than how we can use fashion, food and drink choices, speech patterns, and choice of vocabulary as a litmus for how either we or others may be thinking and feeling at any point in time. In fact, I tell people all the time that even when we talk, we’re engaged in Jazz improvisation, as the words we use have to be relevant to the conversation, because if the goal is to build upon a set of ideas, then what would be the point of using words that few people can comprehend? That’s like talking to a baby about the stock market. What’s the point? So when I’m performing, I’m just using ideas that I already have a handle on. But it’s how I string those ideas together that will either attract or repel you from the “conversation.” In short, since listening comes before comprehension, and comprehension comes before action, then just like martial arts, Jazz is the human practice of creating a continuous sequence of appropriate moment-to-moment decisions, so that when it’s all said and done, you can look back with pride for the choices you’ve made.