All what jazz?

It is not often given to us to discover entire new worlds.  Normally our acquaintance with life proceeds crabwise, adding a little at the edges, filling in this gap, smoothing out that bump. Moreover, it is in the nature of such accretive knowledge that it is bought at ever more cost, with diminishing returns from increasing effort. To be granted the sight of new realm is to be like Keats' stout Cortés, gazing on the Pacific for the first time, or like some child in a fairy-tale, opening a casement to reveal a kingdom. My new kingdom is jazz.

 
Just one year on from looking through that casement, it seems extraordinary to me that it took so long to discover it - as extraordinary as not to have encountered and loved classical music, or English poetry, say.  So skewed was my education by snobbery and prejudice, so blinkered was my own slow progress. But as is often the way with tardy converts, I am now a jazz evangelical, and wherever I can I sing its praises.

Not that I am at all qualified to do so.  My understanding is shallow - that is part of the subject's attraction: there is still so much to discover.  And coming so late and with so many set ways of seeing I am forced to cheat, to use old knowledge as crutches to my new comprehension.

To order the initially daunting pantheon of jazz greats, I have tried hard to find in their musical relationships structures and shapes that are reminiscent of those I already know.  For example, once I had realised the pivotal early role of Louis Armstrong in defining the very language of jazz, I found it useful to think of him as a Monteverdi-like figure, inventing the basic forms and figures which everyone would inherit.

After a while I also began to perceive a holy trinity of musicians who built on Armstrong's work and carried it to new heights.  There was John Coltrane, the JS Bach of the horn, his work ever more abstract, ever more spiritual. There was Charlie 'Bird' Parker, the self-destructive genius beloved by the gods but doomed to an early death - like Mozart, his classical shadow.  And completing the threesome there was the proud and Protean Miles Davis, a veritable Beethoven in his constant searching, his refusal to compromise, his disdain for commercial considerations.

Slightly outside these three stood the astonishingly original and prolific Duke Ellington, along with his spiritual twin Franz Schubert.  Both were masters of the miniature, able to create a universe in just three minute's music; both were also incomprehensibly fecund, turning out hundreds of compositions, nearly every one a masterpiece, nearly every one different.

These have been my guiding lights in the first explorations of this new- found land.  Now, as I become more familiar with the landscape, other great figures emerge.  Billie Holiday, that subtle and melancholy poet of jazz, the Chopin of her day; Sarah Vaughan, surely the vocal equivalent of Liszt in her effortless virtuosity, I could go on; but already these comparisons seem forced, hiding as much as they reveal.  Soon, maybe, I will be able cast away these conceptual crutches, and begin to explore this gift of a world and all that jazz, for and through itself.

(27.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets – Ludwig in Lisbon

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