Jazz

If you've been following my status updates on Facebook, you've probably already figured out that I've been getting really into jazz lately. That's not even the half of it, really. I'm drowning in it. What started as a growing interest in cool jazz has turned into an all out submersion in bebop, hard bop, post bop, fusion, free-jazz, and the like. I've read more Wikipedia albums, downloaded more music, and read more online guitar lessons in the past three days than I have in the past month. Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Count Basie, Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington--they're all over my mind. And as for learning how to play jazz, my scales have suddenly grown from seven notes to eleven, and my fingers are fumbling and jumping and stuttering all over my strings. And can I just say how much modal jazz has opened up the way I write music? I can already see the influence it's going to have on future projects.

And the space--good Lord, the space! There's so much space in jazz to just let things happen. Like in Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, in the segments where the rhythm section just holds a groove and waits--sometimes for several measures--for Miles or Cannonball or Coltrane to make something happen. And in free-jazz, they take that space and they use up every bit of it they can. Free-jazz especially has changed the way I hear the world around me. I recognize different creaks in a door hinge as the door lazily swings open. I hear syncopation and borrowed rhythms in my footsteps and in dishes falling into the sink. I hear the chords created by water running through the pipes or cars driving by. And above all, I hear the wide open space of life, just holding its groove and waiting for something to happen.

Jazz has taken everything I know about music and broken it wide open. Ever since taking music theory in high school, I've understood music pretty well. I recognized the forms and the progressions and the melodies and the scales as things I understood in a sort of formula--well, not exactly a formula, but something pliable that I could still manage with my own hands. And the thing is, even in that seven note, four scale world, music was still so much more to me than the sum of its parts. But jazz--it's easy to get bored listening to anything else after listening to John Coltrane's Ascension. Not much sounds exciting compared to eight guys cutting improvising their own parts at the same time. This isn't to say that I dislike all other music now--the upper level of my spectrum is just broken wide open.

But the biggest thing...jazz has taught me more about life and God than any other type of music. Mostly, the space. There's so much space in life, and God's holding down His groove just waiting for us to do something. And a lot of times, He'll give us a lead in. But since jazz and life are both improvised, there's room for mistakes. So much more room than we with our western scale, top 40, over produced ears allow for.