I did the most ridiculous thing this Saturday. I played jazz on my computer at work and heard it on my headphones. It began fairly well, Miles Davis was getting down to it, a kind of blue, it sounded swell. But about 7 or 8 minutes into it, something made me laugh out loud. I was embarrassed later, too. Get the fucking speakers!
Jazz has peculiar mood about it. It tastes a bit like some sad woman's tears, but she is happy. If you dive deep enough, you can smell it too. It has a strange musty smell. Now I must confess I'm no jazz expert. Far from it, I've heard only very few pieces of it. Yet, even when you listen to it for a few minutes the first time, then a few minutes longer, it feels as if you've been hearing to it all the time.
When I heard it, this past Saturday, I was practically alone in the office. It was late evening, the air conditioning was off and the absolute absence of any ventilation hugged the floor in a stifling embrace. A sad table fan, sourced and dusted from an aloof corner in the office rotated next to me, making me hear the breeze rather than feel it. And there I sat, with sweat lines forming near the base of my neck, trickling slowing onto my mildly hairy chest, head phones snug to fit my ears, listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane disagree over something.
To truly appreciate jazz you see, you need to let it seep into the atmosphere. Let it wet the air around your breath and settle around you. The notes settle down on the chairs beside you, the desk, your hands and so on. You can't hurry it either. The concept fast forwarding, or as we call it these days, skipping forward is non existent. You either hear it, or you don't. It's really that simple. If you decide not to listen to it, that is perfectly fine too. Jazz is an art form where disagreement and non compliance is welcome. It shows in the work of its greatest practitioners, together they disagree, sometimes violently to create something close to perfection. And when last of the melodies flow out of those melody making objects, you can hear the soft tunes still lingering in your ear, the sound of notes around you slowly making its way home, melting, fading away into a far away scene. Then you nod to yourself, then you feel that you have truly been in the company of jazz.
That is when I started laughing. What the fuck am I doing? The soft touches on the cymbals agreed with me. I took off the head phones, still chuckling and hunted around for speakers. To disconnect speakers from another table, pull it threw the stubborn hole in the desk, repeat the same procedure in mine, and then repeat all of it again to replace it to the rightful desk seemed much too much, but the very notion of jazz filling the muggy, dark room felt completely correct. Jazz after all requires sacrifice, in fact genesis of the art form is rooted in the suffering, trauma and angst that pervaded the black culture in the early twentieth century. If however you aren't ready to suffer a little to enjoy the music, that's completely understandable too, come back to it some other time. That is the how every art expressed in pain behaves, if you have no agony you simply have to wait.
Now, how you wonder, could I have discerned all of this on a simple Saturday evening?
Hey, I was in pain. And it wasn't because of the speakers.
