Tuning Slide 4.38- Why Jazz

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
— Miles Davis

[I left Miles’s male pronouns so as not to interrupt the thought.]

Last week I brought the three life lesson posts together in the post about lessons from jazz. But that hardly scratched the surface of jazz and its importance in the world of music. Jazz encompasses so many genres that it would be hard to make a complete list. Wikipedia’s jazz subgenera page lists 54 styles from Acid Jazz to West Coast Jazz with all kinds in-between. I have been a fan of jazz for over 55 years now. I don’t remember the first jazz I discovered, although it included anything I might have heard by Louis Armstrong, Doc Severinsen, Buddy Rich, and others on the Tonight Show or Dick Cavett, and perhaps the first, Al Hirt’s "Java".

Learning and listening to jazz, let alone playing it, is a difficult journey unless you get introduced wisely or have some inner DNA tuned to it. I have worked and wrestled and wrangled away at aspects of jazz in the 50+ years since a fellow DJ at our college station introduced me to the breadth of jazz beyond Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck. The performance and album that did that was the live album Swiss Movement by Les McCann and Eddie Harris. The now iconic “Compared to What” blew me away. I have never looked back, forever glad I found it.



So, what did Miles mean in that quote above and how is that a basic lesson from jazz? First, as in last week’s post, it is the reminder that unless you are willing to be out front, “projecting yourself,” your jazz street cred will be suspect. A jazz musician will, by the nature of the beast, be up front. Jazz means to be yourself and let people get to know who you are. Not an easy thing to do. That iconic Miles Davis style of playing downward and wandering the stage with his back to the audience was not a way of hiding. It brought the audience upright, searching for the sound. He did it with a microphone, of course, so his sound would get out there, especially with the Harmon mute. He was in charge of the stage and projected energy, electricity, spirit. You never doubted Miles, even when you didn’t understand a thing he was doing.

Which is the second thing from jazz- you have to work on your ideas. Miles was a man with ideas, way more than any one person could follow. He was never satisfied with what he had already developed. He all but invented “cool jazz” and then “modal jazz” and immediately moved to something else. Once he did it, it was time to move on, discover something different, invent something no one ever played before. He made the complex sound so simple, but few could duplicate it. No one sounded like Miles, though many of us wanted to. His ideas were so rich and diverse.

Apply that to life and you have a powerful understanding of what makes a person stand out, and what each of us can learn to do.

✓ First, be yourself- and project that self. That does not mean that introverts need to stand up and shout to the world who they are. That’s not what Miles means. It means be who you are. Is the “you” that people meet in your daily life the “real you?” Sure we have different persona depending on the location and group, but do you shine through, no matter what?

✓ Second, think for yourself. Knowledge is, I believe, a combination of learning, study, experience, personality, and personal interpretation. Too often we just blindly accept something that someone else has said- as long as it matches our beliefs, or reject it because it doesn’t. That isn’t thinking for yourself. That’s allowing someone else to do it for you. When learning jazz, we start by listening and learning from others, we play transcriptions or develop them ourselves. But then we learn to think of our own melodies and improvisations. Do that with your daily life.

Brent Vaarstra at the Learn Jazz Standards website had a list of four reasons why every musician should study jazz. Like Miles’s quote, it is a starting place for that life and music connection. Brent’s four reasons are:

1. [Jazz] will expand your harmonic knowledge.

2. It will force you to be proficient on your instrument.

3. It will improve your ear…big time.

4. It will help you become a better composer.

As I look at those, three things come to mind, reasons why these four are important, no matter what your favorite music genre, if you play jazz or not.

• It will make you think because
• It will be a new language that
• Will introduce you to things you never thought about before.

Now that makes sense. When you start paying attention, your mind begins to learn to focus on what ’s happening. It is a development of a mindfulness of what is happening. You are no longer a passive observer or listener, you are moving toward an understanding. A few months ago my wife and I were driving and I was listening to jazz and blues. My wife is not a musician so I asked her if she wanted to understand what was happening in the music- changes, 12-bar blues, etc. I spent a couple of songs lining it out. She commented that she now had a different appreciation for what she was hearing. She still doesn’t know music theory, but she is hearing something different.

Which is a language, a different language. I have spent many, many years working on the language of jazz and how someone like John Coltrane can do what he does. I am now beginning to hear the language. I have crossed some line into a different language- and culture. I am amazed at what I hear in unique ways that I never knew were there.

Which opens me to differences, diversity, cultural complexities, ways of thinking that impact my world-view.

And if that doesn’t apply to life, I don’t know what does.