(As an aside, I haven't left that classic rock music behind me. It's all still there, I still listen to it, I still have every Pink Floyd album worth owning, plus The Wall, I still love King Crimson and have a great time with Zeppelin, so all you rockers panicking can cut it out. I did basically stop listening to metal, though. Except for Opeth. Mmmmm, Opeth).
Where It All Began
So I studied jazz guitar on and off for a few years, mostly because it's basically the most advanced and interesting stuff you can play on the instrument. You can only run pentatonic scale patterns over blues riffs for so long, you know? And metal excited me for a bit, because it was more difficult. But then you realized that the only reason it was more difficult was because it was faster. It was still basically the same thing as rock, just sped up a bit. But jazz was entirely different. A "Whole New World," for all you Disney fans out there (man I cannot believe I just made that joke). But more on this later.
Anyway, despite the fact that I'd been messing around with jazz guitar, I still wasn't really into jazz. Like I had a few recordings of jazz guitarists (mostly Wes Montgomery, of course), but I more appreciated them for their impressive guitar work than I actually, you know, enjoyed listening to them.
But then, one day, I heard Charlie Parker's nonet (fun fact: a nonet is a nine-piece band. Like a quintet, but with nine people) playing A Night In Tunisia.
(And yes, that is a very young Miles Davis on trumpet there)
I don't know what did it, but somehow, when I heard that recording, everything clicked. To me, that music had a spirit to it that was just so vibrant, so alive. It was technically demanding, but at the same time, it was incredibly soulful. They put themselves into their music in a way that I'd never really heard musicians do before, and it spoke to me. It said "Man, forget everything else. You want to be able to create like these guys do." I'd never been so excited about improvising in my life. Suddenly it became less about playing guitar solos and more about creating, on the spot, a statement, an expression of yourself, your soul. Something that only you could say, that no one else could ever express, that even if they played the same notes in the same order as you, they still wouldn't be saying what you said. Man, just about every alto sax player who's ever lived has tried to learn Bird's solo (Bird was Charlie Parker's nickname, for the uninitiated) from that recording, but none of them have ever been able to play it quite like he did.
But that sort of expressiveness doesn't come easy. Miles Davis once famously said "Sometimes you have to play for a long time before you're able to play like yourself." And I soon learned that half of playing - more than half, probably - is listening. You've heard the expression "You are what you eat?" Well, with music, you sound like what you listen to. And the more widely listened you are, the more you kind of pull from to knit together, the wider the range you have to synthesize sounds into your own unique voice. So I started listening like crazy. First thing I did, I went out and bought a bunch of jazz albums - Kind of Blue by Miles Davis was one, Giant Steps by John Coltrane was another. And the more I heard, the more I wanted. I suddenly just couldn't get enough of it.
Here's Coltrane's Giant Steps:
Man, that blew my mind when I first heard it. Still does, every time I listen to it. He's cooking along at around 300 BPM (that's beats per minute), switching keys roughly every two beats, and he somehow manages to have it sound musical. I used to look up to guys like John Petrucci and Steve Vai when I was a teenager but this, this was a whole new level entirely. I couldn't even fathom it.
Anyway, I was talking earlier about listening. This also mean that I had to do a bit of a cull of my music. "But I thought you wanted to diversify your listening as much as possible!" you ask, confused. I did. And I do. But here's the thing: Not all music is helpful. Just as how a balanced diet doesn't include McDonald's, balanced listening doesn't really include three chord music. The whole point of broader listening is trying to push your ears outside of the box, and it's hard to do that when some music keeps pulling you back in. I know to some of you I probably sound like an elitist jerk, but there doesn't really seem to be any other way of putting it. Some music is meant to be listened to, and some music is meant to be consumed, and I try to avoid the latter.
Why Jazz?
There are a few things about jazz that really attract me to it.
The first is, like I said before, its challenge for the instrumentalist. If you want to push yourself on your instrument, go for jazz. I can't think of a single other genre that will work you more. Maybe classical, for piano, but even there, just about everything you're playing has been written out beforehand. Here's the deal: Jazz pushes you in all three major ways: Technically, because you've got to be a master of your instrument to be able to play effectively. You've got to be able to shred at lightning speeds, to be intimately acquainted with the different positions, and be acutely aware of the unique sounds, abilities, and opportunities your instrument brings to the table. It's not enough to just memorize scale patterns, because it pushes you outside of boxes. And that segues into the second way, mentally. A comprehensive knowledge of music theory is key if you want to be able to create in a jazz setting. There are always these myths about how the greatest musicians never knew a lick of theory - there's not a shred of truth to that. These guys studied a ton of theory, formally or informally, but they did it. You're bouncing between different keys, you're improvising solos over +5b9 and min/maj13#11 chords, you've got to be able to understand how things work together, and why. Most importantly, this helps to push the boundaries - if you don't know that you're "supposed" to play an E natural in a certain spot, how are you going to know that you can get out of the box by playing an Eb instead? The third way is emotionally. With jazz, it's not enough to just be able to play a chart. You've got to put yourself into it, you've got to be able to play stuff that's musical, that's compelling, that can push the audience to feel what you're feeling. It's not just enough to have game, you've gotta have soul, too. This made me realize: All that talk about being a technically gifted musician vs being an expressive musician is a false dichotomy. If you see that as being either/or, as being you can either play fast or play soulfully, you will never be anything more than a mediocre musician.
One of my favourite examples of all these things coming together is right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_PmQrXv4O0
Technically, it's pretty impressive. It's not a fast standard, but Jim Hall still manages to throw in some blazing lines - which are, most incredibly, very tastefully understated. The speed is not a "Look at how fast I can play! moment, but rather an expression of what he felt was most fitting at that point. It's also mentally impressive too - he's stretching the harmony of the song, going outside the box while still keeping it palatable to the average listener. His chord solo is also pretty amazing on those lines - the ability to, on the fly, come up with a series of chords that both work together to form a musical statement as well as sound good over the underlying harmony is not easy at all. Finally, emotionally it reaches a level that I couldn't even imagine when I first heard it. It was a hugely influential song on me for that reason, because it's what taught me that by being conscious of your dynamics, your picking technique, your tone, etc, a guitar can be very nearly as expressive as a horn (note: "horn" is jazz slang for any wind instrument, not a French Horn).
Another big thing for me is the subtlety of the music. It doesn't smack you over the head with emotion, but instead slowly lures you in. That was something I'd become a bit burnt out on in rock music. When it's angry, it's ANGRY! When it's happy, it's HAPPY! When it's sad, it is DEPRESSED! It beats you over the head a bit with what its saying. Not that there's anything wrong with that; sometimes you're upset about something and what you really need is something that just screams ANGER! But more and more, I began wanting something with a bit more emotional depth to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEC8nqT6Rrk
Listen to that song. It's off one of the first jazz albums I ever heard, and is one of the most well-known recordings of all time. It's very expressive, very emotional, but what emotion is it conveying? It doesn't instantly assault you with being happy or sad or angry or fearful. Instead, to me, anyway, it's got a thousand different emotions to it, many of which don't have names. It reaches inside and pushes parts of your brain that you didn't know where there, making you have feelings you didn't know existed. To me, it allows for a greater level of communication between the musician and the audience - the musician puts his heart and soul into what he's playing, and the audience takes away from that, well, whatever they take away from it. Like a good book, the listener can take what's being said and be impacted by it in a different way (yeah, yeah, call me a filthy post-modernist. Go on, I dare you), and jazz has more room to do that than any other style of music I've heard.
Another thing I love about jazz is the way that it's not afraid of dissonance. Rock always made itself out to be about rebellion and bucking standards, but compositionally it was pretty tame. Even black metal and death metal that I've heard will usually mess around with tritones and maybe the occasional minor second and call it a day. In jazz, harmony goes outside the box all the time, and it's all about taking sounds that clash and making them sound musical anyway. To me, that seems almost more honest. It's very true to life. Our world is full of dissonance, and if you just avoid things that aren't pleasant, you'll never live at all. But if you find a way to take that dissonance and make it musical, poetic even, then you've transformed your setting. Okay, enough pseudo-philosophy, here's some Monk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vofbnkQcW_Q
So What?
I wanted to call this section "So What's Next?" but I couldn't resist making that awful pun. It's tough to be an amateur jazz musician because there isn't much of a scene for beginners. Most of the jazz clubs out there are dominated by guys who have been playing their instrument for decades, so for someone like me, who's young, inexperienced, and pretty mediocre, to find a gig is not easy.
But I've got a bigger concern than that, though it encompasses that. My concern is this: I am worried that jazz is taking the same path as classical music to becoming "museum music" - in other words, music that music students get together and listen to and write papers on, and that's respected for its achievements, but that has absolutely no impact on the culture around it. It's not there yet, because jazz still has some importance in more urban areas, but it's not too far off. And I don't really want to see that happen. Jazz is vital music, and if it's not communicating anything, where's its vitality?
Miles Davis responded to this by merging with all sorts of different styles. After Woodstock, he invented jazz/rock fusion. Later, he did a collaboration with Prince. When he died, he was partway through recording an album that mixed jazz with hip-hop. And I don't know, maybe that's the answer. Fusion, like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnR39KzcKUk
Or even like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Siq2qkINyPY (minus the dated synth sounds, of course)
That might be more palatable to a modern audience than straight jazz. And I love fusion just as much as I love jazz, so it's no concern of mine if it does.
But my concern isn't losing "saxophone music," or whatever. I mean the sax is a great instrument, but the issue to me is the aesthete behind jazz, the idea of music being the opportunity to create on the spot, to inspire, for the musician to communicate to the audience exactly where he is and what he's feeling at that precise point in time. Its vital creativity is, to me, a celebration of life, and is something that should not die. I've become almost incapable of playing other people's songs note for note now, and I get frustrated when people say "Okay play this riff exactly as written" or "Oh man, can you do the entire Stairway to Heaven solo?" because to me, you're not making music, you're just taking what someone else said and parroting it. It's glorified Guitar Hero. And I just don't see the point. Why should a band go up there and play Comfortably Numb the way Floyd played it? Why not instead just put on the album? It's the same thing, only it sounds better. And when bands play original material, why play the same song the same way every night? If I wanted to hear that, I'd put it on my ipod and listen to it there. Sure, when I improvise my own solo over a song, it's not going to be as good as the original solo, but that's the whole point. You're not up there to make yourself look good. If you're playing music for your ego, you're going to fail.
In other words, this jazz mentality is something that I think is applicable everywhere, and something that ought to be a part of just about all music. Why parrot when you can create?
To close, here's one of my all-time favourite jazz performances by a man who is possibly the greatest guitarist to have ever lived: Wes Montgomery. Listen to this if you want to hear the raw levels that the guitar can get to.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZsdGVYqGco
PS: One closing note. There's a lot of dismissal amongst jazz guys of "smooth jazz" - guys like Michael Buble, Kenny G, that sort of thing. There's a reason for that. These guys take the aesthete of jazz that I was just talking about and urinate all over it for the sake of money. It sounds like just your typical snobbery, but it's not. Not only is their music bad, but they've publicly defaced the image of jazz. If you've ever heard someone describe jazz as sounding like "elevator music" or something along those lines, its because of guys like this. I'm only saying this because novice jazzers tend to describe anything that sounds smooth or cool as "smooth jazz." Never, EVER go up to a professional working jazz musician at a gig and say "Great playing, man! I love smooth jazz like that!" He's not going to take it the same way you mean it.
Let me put it this way: Kenny G is to jazz what Avril Lavigne is to punk rock.
Just a caveat.
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