Le Jazz
Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Kokomo Me Baby” has made me want to break every window in my home, open the door and keep on walking, warm earth meeting each stride. The Stones have made me almost punch out my boss. Frank Sinatra’s recording of Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around” has triggered in me one of the most profound, bittersweet rushes of life I’ve known. A plaintive waif’s self-serious six-string confessional might help us to imagine ourselves as the stars of our very own movies. Jazz increasingly seems to helps us to envision ourselves as the stars of our very own luxury car commercial.

Jazz is in the academy. Jazz has been canonized. Jazz has left the building. The improvisations float from the printed textbook page, through their acolyte, into the classroom and from there out into the ether. They’re anchored neither by their dance with an evolving body of compositions, or their creator’s bandstand dialogue with his peers.

Isn’t it remarkable that most of the repertoire of Jazz and the basic vocabulary of Jazz improvisation developed simultaneously yet independently? Did the songs breed the rhapsodies? Or was it the other way around? Did Kern ever have one ear on Armstrong? Did they once need one another? Did their dance help them to define themselves, and us? Who rejected whom? Who’s sorry now?

It’s hard to find things to believe in. It’s hard to believe in a note. Heck, it’s hard to believe in an exalted flurry of notes. It’s hardest still when it appears that what was once a “means” is now widely backslapped and high-fived as an “end”.

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