Jazz sounds like someone transcribed a migraine onto sheet music.
I say this loosely of course, because jazz isn’t written to sheet music, a huge amount of it is improvised, which would probably explain why none of the people playing it ever agree what song to do.
I’ve heard jazz described as “a bunch of people playing different songs on different instruments while falling down the stairs”. My brother calls it “a wild display of instruments that all sound like distorted fart noises”. My dad has the most concise metaphor where he says it’s “bad” and then changes the topic.
Now I know that there are huge ties to black history with jazz and from that perspective it is something truly wonderful, a beautiful expression of freedom, but as music, to me, I can’t really describe why it’s so heinous to my ears other than coming up with elaborate insults for it.
I suppose I could give it a try but first I have to clarify, when I say I dislike jazz, I mean true, proper jazz. The one with 10-minute piano solos and tempo changes, no show ever the same, the one where each piece could be titled “indecision” because of how willing the band is the change the entire song halfway through.
It’s just a lot. It’s a shame too because I love the instruments. Nothing improves a song like a sax solo, some of my favourite have a load of jazz instruments doing beautiful stuff and making fantastic music. When in their own environment though, their natural habitat, nothing improves the sound more than finding a different bar to drink at.
I suppose I like my music structured. Even if I hear a song that I hate, it feels like that’s the song that they wanted me to hear. That’s how it’s supposed to be. But jazz is by its nature unstructured. That’s what so many people love about it, and to me, that’s probably its biggest whoopsie.
A solo is a great way to segment from one structured bit to the next, but when the whole thing is a solo it just makes you wonder why the rest of the band isn’t enthusiastic enough to join in.
The wackiness of it doesn’t always get me though. There have been times where I’ve really loved listening to jazz in the right context. Granted, it wasn’t “deep jazz” as I’m coining it, with the tempo nonsense and the out of sync band. It was a small band of buskers jamming along in the city square.
Where most buskers are either “sad white boy with acoustic guitar doing song covers” or “sad white girl with piano background music doing song covers”, a band that seemed like they were actually having fun playing their instruments was great.
They were fantastic players and had the common decency not to ruin any brilliant songs like the sad white girl with piano backing up the road who was butchering “Take it on the run” by REO Speedwagon.
I suppose like most things, Jazz is one of those things that you hate until something clicks one day. I’ll probably come around to it, in my experience a lot of middle aged people like it so I’ll get there eventually. I just hope that I don’t come around to it too soon because I’d never be able to live with me wanting to listen to jazz and my friends constantly quoting Bee-Movie at me for the remainder of my university life.
“You like Jazz?” – Jerry Seinfeld, 2007