The Spirit of Jazz
For the majority of my life, the music I listened to was consistent. It was consistent in the sense that for a given song, whether through recording or live performance, there was more or less one version of it; the primary components of the music—the lyrics, the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, textures, and structure—were relatively the same across multiple renditions, if not completely identical.. And I found that this trend would span across a variety of genres; whether it was a Coldplay, Rush, or Yerin Baek concert, no matter which performance the footage was sourced from, there would be little to no deviation from the versions that they recorded on their past album. Sure, there might have been some stylistic alterations in the tempo, the dynamics, and the articulation of certain phrases, but it was never to the point where one couldn’t effortlessly sing along to the lyrics or be unable to predict when the chorus or the bridge was coming up. Being an avid fan of these artists, it was incredibly easy to memorize nearly every song, whose melodies, rhythms, and form were already so deeply internalized within me that I, merely in thought, could play it out in my mind on repeat with ease.
To a large extent, I believe that we’ve been conditioned to listen to music with a certain univocality and with an expectation of a kind of auditory consistency that taps into a uniquely specific emotional memory for each of us. We expect that a certain song makes us feel a certain way, where the integral elements of the music we hear are equally integral parts of our reminiscences.
It was only when I started listening to jazz in 2015 that I would gradually learn to decouple these expectations from the listening experience. When I began listening to jazz, I listened to it with the same expectation of consistency that was characteristic of all the previous musical genres I had already accustomed myself to. Upon discovering the plethora of jazz content online, ranging from live performances recorded by phone, to live streams hosted by jazz clubs themselves, to entire libraries of jazz albums available on Spotify, I listened to a particular video or a specific recording dozens, if not hundreds of times over the course of years. I began to deeply internalize each of those individual iterations, just as I did with all the music I had listened to before—memorizing them down to a note and bridging those vivid memories of the music with concurrent life events to create profound emotional associations with those songs.
But as I listened more and more, as I began to listen to three, four, or five renditions of a given song, sometimes even going to see live performances in person, I inevitably realized something—I never felt the same way listening to one version as I did another. The tempo was much faster or much slower; sometimes they would play the tune in a different key; sometimes the head (the main theme of a tune) had an altered rhythmic or melodic composition. The lineup of musicians was different each time—sometimes a completely different lineup compared to that of the original recording. The solos played by each of those musicians were almost never the same, not even remotely, despite constituting the majority of any jazz tune. They can play a song dozens, if not hundreds, of times and are able to hear beyond the echoes of the past, whereas I so desperately and selfishly clung onto a beloved memory. While my mind, having heard only one version hundreds of times, so eagerly expected to hear a song one way and consequently feel a certain way, the reality was that the auditory experience of each performance inexorably evoked different feelings. I eventually realized that it wasn’t only a new genre of music that I had discovered; I had been exposed to an entirely different art form.
I slowly began to realize that jazz, by design and by tradition, often deviated from musical convention. Being so fundamentally rooted in the spirit of improvisation and the spontaneity that can only be truly achieved within a live performance, it was incredibly unlikely to find jazz musicians that played a song exactly the same way every single time. In the mind of a jazz musician, a particular sentence or phrase is evanescent; it is ephemeral and fleeting emotion in the heat of the moment, one unable to be ever replicated. They abhor the scarcity mindset of pop culture, exemplified by the countless numbers of music copyright cases, wherein one party accuses another of purportedly “stealing” a melody or other elements of an ostensibly original musical composition Unlike many of these mainstream artists that become emotionally attached to the magic and exhilaration of a hit record, of a seemingly “perfect” composition able to connect with the masses, jazz artists have no reason to hoard their successes. They know they have so much else to say, so many other emotions they can convey, so many other stories they can tell through their unique voice; they have no real reason to become so intimately attached to one iteration of themselves out of thousands in their lifetime.
Jazz musicians implicitly understand that it’s not worthwhile to burden themselves to rehearse every specific note of a piece thousands of times, to achieve an impeccable degree of “perfection,” because perfection is a meaningless concept in a world of imperfect judgment. This performance of July by Ben Wendel is undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of music, but I can’t quite say the same for the studio version, another performance, or the version I saw live just last week at the Village Vanguard—not because any of those other renditions are inferior in my view or the artist’s view, but merely because I retain specific memories associated with that particular version. And while that version ends up being perfect for me, the irony is that they never sought to create the perfect performance in the first place; rather, they acknowledge that they only need to put their heart and soul into the music, and by doing so they will inevitably create a version that will end up being perfect for someone. Because we all hear the music differently, they don’t waste their time haplessly obsessing over the details to create one flawless, ideal version of a song They neither specifically cater to the majority nor to a specific subset of individuals, but rather, they let freedom and faith in their artistic vision to determine the pathway to success, and not the other way around.
All this is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with consistency or this internalization of what constitutes a song in memory; it is undeniably a powerful tool to aid us in understanding and thus emotionally connecting with our past selves. However, as Kierkegaard puts it, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” While reminiscing has incredible value in keeping us grounded and conscious of what ultimately led us to where we are today, it is evident, whether through our experience of music, our relationships, or our work, that we have an inimical predisposition to cling onto this idealized conception of what seems right—not what actually is right. We so desperately want things to be familiar, to always follow a familiar pattern or shape, and to be as we expected them to be. The method by which jazz musicians approach their art—their freedom within this brave cycle of iteration, improvisation, and generosity—can serve to remind us:
to iterate—by embracing the ephemeral, by enabling ourselves, even despite external criticism, to be proud of our story that constantly changes because we ourselves constantly change.
to improvise—by allowing ourselves to truly listen, to denude ourselves of our self-absorbed expectations on what something should sound like, on what something should be, but simply what is.
to be generous—by saying something meaningful, by constantly sharing something made with passion, care, and commitment to the art, not by the selfish confines of a quid pro quo, and not by a romanticization of the ideal and the perfect.
