Jazz blog

This is a blog post I'm writing for WIUX. It's a first draft, so feel free to criticize.

Awhile back, I was perusing the New York Times when I happened upon an article that caught my eye: a National Endowment for the Arts analysis of the average age of the jazz concertgoer. According to an article citing the same study on jazz.com, the aforementioned age has risen from 29 to 46 in the time period 1986-2009¹. Jazz music itself, according to the article, is in a state of crisis. I do not repudiate this point, but rather I come to offer a possible etiology for this virus that is ossifying this living, breathing American art form. My explanation is thus: jazz music as a whole is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the American cultural landscape. This change in our cultural attitude, it should be noted, is not a function of the waning importance of jazz in our national identity. Jazz remains as vital as it ever was in chronicling the musical heritage of America. Rather, this change is due to a steady shift in the popular perception of jazz music, one that has been taking place since the introduction of free jazz and modal jazz by artists like Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, respectively. I am referring to the perception of jazz as essentially an elitist art form, one that has no room for the poor or underprivileged, the marginalized rebels or yearning dreamers. Jazz, according to the average consumer of pop culture in the US, is an art form that is best enjoyed in an expensive music conservatory or hip coffee shop. I hereby call shenanigans on this wholly unsubstantial, slighted perception of jazz music. One needs only a cursory overview of the history of jazz to understand why this belief is deeply flawed. A shallow understanding of the basic nature of jazz is had by most people in the United States. It is general knowledge that jazz originated somehow from the slave songs sung by Africans exported to the US. This basic fact does not bring into consideration what happened to jazz after it got here. After the slaves were freed, jazz was adopted by the new lower class African-Americans as a unique facet of their nascent cultural identity. To these early adopters, jazz was not simply a dead academic exercise. It was a modus Vivendi that in many cases was literally the only thing keeping their roofs overhead and plates full. A common occurrence in turn-of-the-century New Orleans was the rent party, in which a group of cohabited musicians would invited everyone they knew to their often squalid and dilapidated apartment, in an often vain attempt to raise rent money. College students especially should be thankful for this idea, for it birthed the concept of the house party to which we all owe so much. The exciting and raucous nature of jazz did not end in the Big Easy, however. As jazz disseminated throughout the US, its practitioners exported their love of a good party to wherever they went. These men and women smoked and drank in excess, partied too hard, and laughed too loudly for mainstream America to be entirely comfortable with their presence, which led to harsh segregation imposed on venues which jazz musicians frequented. This in turn led to a strong backlash against segregation by the jazz community, perhaps most famously skewered in Charles Mingus’ song, “Fables of Faubus”, in which he derides the segregationist governor of Arkansas as a fascist and a Nazi. Oscar Peterson penned the civil rights anthem “Hymn to Freedom”. Max Roach released a spoken word album entitled “Freedom Now- We Insist!” which many consider the first hip-hop music ever recorded. The point of this long, meandering history lesson is to illustrate the vibrant nature of jazz music and the culture that surrounded it. I could name more examples still. Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow traffics such copious quantities of marijuana that its street name in New York and surrounds becomes “mezz”. Charlie Parker exhausts himself so thoroughly in his 35 years of life that the coroner performing the autopsy estimated the age of the heroin- and alcoholism-addled corpse to be closer to 60. In doing so, he becomes an icon of the nascent hipster movement, inspiring a generation of youth to wrest their lives from the forces which held control and live in their moment. The practitioners of jazz understood their music, felt it, and dedicated their lives to it in a way which few people before or since accomplished in any profession, be it musical or otherwise. I posit that jazz, far from being a decrepit intellectual posture, is actually the very music which accommodates the poor, the underprivileged, the dreamers and rebels of yesterday and today. It was and is the people’s music, a chronicle of the marginalized members of American society in the last 120 odd years. I believe that if more of the average consumers of pop culture in the US knew the story which I am telling, the true story of jazz, its tendency towards irrelevance in the national consciousness would reverse and it would regain some of its lost stature, not to mention a new generation of listeners eager to consume and weave their own story among the still-growing tapestry of the quintessential American art form.

A long hiatus

Hmm... it's been about thirteen months since my last post. Much has happened in the world and in my life. I turned 20, finished my first year at IU with a 3.2 cumulative gpa. By itself, this isn't terribly impressive, but I jumped from a 2.74 gpa first semester to a 3.74 second semester. This was a huge personal accomplishment for me. I've never received a GPA as high as what I did second semester, and I did it taking the hardest classes I've ever taken. This triumph signaled a change in my self-perception regarding my academic abilities. My official version for most of my life was that I had the ability, but chose not to go the full distance, and languished in mediocrity. Obviously, I changed this last semester, and the results show. Now that I've discovered academic motivation, I'm never going back to the Calvin-esque underachiever I once was. I still love Calvin and Hobbes though. If i ever get terminal cancer, my Make-a-Wish will be to meet Bill Waterson. 

It's been awhile

It has been awhile since my last post, and this is largely because i'm having a fantastic time at IU. This IFS class has made me so optimistic about college and my ability to get good grades ( i currently have an A) that i really don't have anything to complain about, and my normal philosophical drive is being met by my class. i'll probably be posting infrequently-ish.

My Dead Dog

As of late, my dog Gus has been sick. His fur has become mottled and clumpy, losing its former sheen. His eyes, once so bright they made me reconsider his supposedly low intelligence, have grown cloudy and dull. He is dying, and I feel that in some small way, his growth and death mirror my own transition from youth, to adolescence, and the early stages of that creeping inevitability we teenagers fear in the deepest recesses of our psyche.

I first met Gus in 1997, when I was in second grade. He was a sprightly young puppy with a fondness for hot dogs (no matter how many times he threw up as a result) and I loved him like any boy loves his dog. He grew up with me, through good times (elementary and high school) and bad (middle school). I am leaving for college on Aug. 3rd, and perhaps he knows that the period in which this boy needs his dog is drawing to a close. At the risk of descending into befuddling sentimentality, I believe that he, like so many other loyal dogs throughout history, has stayed as long as his human needed him. Maybe his final gift is his death. Maybe his final message to me is in the vein of the symbolism of our parallel lives: that the death of my youth must usher in a transition to something much more necessary. Like my faithful dog, I go somewhere I know not of. Hopefully, I can stride into the unknown with as much courage as Gus has shown; his snout held high, uncowed by his last great adventure. RIP Gus

Late Night Drives

One of my favorite parts of away games in football was the drive home. I would get off the bus after the game, change into street clothes, and head immediately to Taco Bell. Taco Bell was as close to a postgame tradition as we got in my group of football friends, so we headed there, win or loss. We would laugh and joke, and celebrate or commiserate depending on how the game had gone. Then, when the last burritos were eaten, I would get in my car and start to drive. The sense of freedom sublimely tickled me like the sweat-touched locks of hair on my forehead, and as I drove, I felt that I was leaving the world behind. This is the beauty of late night drives. The exquisite aloneness, that acutely sweet mixture of cold night air and the twinkling firmament above. We (I speak for modern society as a whole here; I hesitate to think whether I am qualified or not) are constantly surrounded by other people in our lives in this particular time. 4.00$/gallon gas nonwithstanding, we are supplied with a veritable multitude of ways to connect with one another. Phone, email, text messaging, even the jackass who blogs about his infinitessimally insignificant opinions at four o' clock in the morning. Yet the converse of this great proliferation is what we lose: the ability or want to be alone. The dichotomy of alone and together has come to define the human experience more than any other, and we are on the path to losing one side of it. I am as guilty as anyone, I am no saint. Yes, it is true that my cellphone is bright and waiting in my pocket for my order to connect with anyone, anywhere. Maybe this mystical sense of detatchment is a fool's illusion. Maybe I am wrong. But like those that stayed behind in Plato's effortlessly esoteric allegory of the cave, that fleeting shadow, that simple relaxing, is real enough for me.

God and everything else

When I think of god, I think of space. Not the space between (i.e. dave matthews and co.), but space as in cosmological space. God to me represents the indescribable loneliness of the void, and the churning nuclear furnace of the brightest blue star. God is the trillionth of a second after the big bang, ejecting matter from whence our reality was wrought, and the trillion years that will elapse before our universe whimpers into dissolution. The ancient greeks thought that a mysterious ether pervaded our universe, causing all atomic interaction (replace "ether" with "dark matter" and you basically have modern astrophysics). God, to me, is this ether. Blanketing everything, enveloping all those little probability clouds and black holes.