Jazz

Jazz was always a crowd's type of music. You look at New Orleans, or even go back to the slave traditions, and it wasn't 5 professionals on a heightened stage, and everybody else sat in comfortable chairs, stroking their chin watching.

I was at a concert the other night, and the sax player on stage saw one of his buddies come through the door. This was all during an very good vibes solo, so I was a bit angered when the sax player starts to wave his buddy into a seat right next to the stage. The sax player then started to take pictures of this guy and his girlfriend. But then I realized, jazz has turned into listening to the vibes player solo, and has turned away from having fun with music.

This is in part due to recording. With a recording you can very easily sit in your room and study exactly what the drummer is doing, or what the piano player is doing, and the CD becomes an educational tool for understanding jazz. That is a very necessary part of learning to play jazz, but people have began to take that educational look on all of jazz. It would be very hard to have a party in the middle of the Half Note while Coltrane is playing away, or to not want to study Bird's playing at Minton's playhouse. I respect those venues greatly. But I think jazz also should encourage a revival of the older traditions where everybody (musicians included) can dance and shout and have fun. You don't see that much anymore, at least in the commercial jazz scenes.

I want to see something like this more often. Look at how much fun the crowd is having and how much fun Jimmy is having. Check out the guy at 4:46.