Learning To Love Jazz Again

The first album I ever owned was the first record my dad ever bought, Time Out by Dave Brubeck. He gave me a cassette of this when I was 7 or 8 and I wore it out. I remember being in 6th grade right when ODB was huge and this cat Justin Reid letting me listen to his dubbed tape of 'Shimmy ya' on his walkman. I heard nothing musical about it. The non-threatening Brubeck still made more sense to me .




Later, I went through the obligatory punk and hardcore phase, listened to Minor Threat and Black Flag, and practiced my HXC dancing in a full length mirror in my basement. I grew up, broke my edge, smoked a lot of weed, flirted dangerously and shamefully with jambands, stopped smoking weed and got into indie, noise, and the avant garde. Jazz virtually left my vocabulary. I liked free jazz, having taken out Albert Ayler cds from the library I worked at but didnt really understand it until my freshman year of college at Purchase. I was the only person in my freshman class of 300 or so that wasnt taking a mandatory science class (i opted for intro to ecology instead). There was a mandatory lecture that night and I was alone in my dorm, alone in the freshman section of campus. Laying on my bed, I blasted Coltrane's Interstellar Space as loud as my cheap speakers would go and GOT it. Rashied Ali was laying down this incredible base of texture that Coltrane was just ripping to shreds with sheets, walls, cascades of sound. But it was as poetic as it was raw. Deeply emotional, even spiritual, exhilarating and fucking PUNK.





Purchase did ruin straight ahead jazz for me though. Very quickly I grew extremely jaded about jazz musicians. There were moments where jazz people seemed to bethe worst people in the world. The halls of the conservatory were clogged with self absorbed, tasteless, misogynist assholes. The music made by the Jazz Conservatory students every Thursday night in the cafe or at Jazz parties in the Olde was technically rigorous but emotionally false, lacking of any substance. When they attempted to reach beyond jazz, the results were even worse. The worst music imaginable: ska bands...sub-Dave Matthews frat boy music...awful funk or even worse, reggae. How could I associate myself with this lurid trash? I was way cooler than jazz and certainly cooler than jazz people. A friend and I briefly considered running a show on the campus radio station called "Fuck the Jazz Conservatory" and playing nothing but screaming, screeching free jazz and free improv freakouts.


But lately, I have picked up a Bill Evans Trio record and have been listening to it on the bus to the Garden Works office. This was a record that my dad would love; hell, I could play this around my grandmother. But it FEELS stupendous. It feels right. The level of improvisation is just absurd. It is as if the trio themselves are an instrument being playing by someone else. It is also fucking punk. Having graduated and continuing to grow, splitting the fucking East coast entirely, jazz is no longer a 4 letter word. Does this mean I getting old? Sure, but who gives a fuck? Bumping 'A Love Supreme' in an empty office in the pouring rain makes me feel like the move was worth it, makes it psychic-ly and emotionally right.

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