Jazz & Me - Part 1

It came across the radio as I was flipping through stations on a bright yellow Sports Walkman. A walking bass rumbling from below, a piano tinkling from above, a snare and high-hat holding them together.  I don’t know what songs I heard, who performed them or what era or style of jazz they came from. I was sitting on a bus in Bogota in September 1996, heading toward the university on a college semester abroad. I was expecting those months would leave me well-versed in Latin culture and music. That day, instead, I felt like I had discovered jazz – even though I’d been listening to it for years. 

I was already well-versed in the enigmatic coolness of Miles Davis’s seminal album Kind of Blue and the spiritual candor of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and could drop the names of a bunch of other jazz musicians.  But when I strayed too far from my jazz comfort zones, I quickly felt lost. The music often left me feeling adrift in a sonic ocean, like I could barely keep my head above water amid a flood of harsh notes and wave after wave of indistinguishable solos. I alternated between loving jazz and feeling like it sounded like a bunch of honking horns. Perhaps that’s why that day on the bus seemed like a seminal moment. I didn’t have to think about whether I liked it or why – I just did. For about 20 minutes, a genre of music that often sounded like a chaotic improvisation was suddenly making sense.

Right up until it didn’t.

Because once I got back home to my collection of jazz CDs (there was no “cloud” back then), I felt like I was right back where I started – lost in the jungle of jazz. I knew there was a particular jazz “sound” that I liked, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Coltrane and Miles were good jazz starting points, but following their musical careers was not easy on the uninitiated. Coltrane’s late work was dominated by the less-structured and often dissonant “free jazz,” a genre that challenges even some of the most sophisticated of jazz enthusiasts. Miles, never content to stay in one place for long, moved from bebop to cool to jazz-rock fusion until, by the end of his days, he was putting out albums that could have easily been confused with Michael Jackson or Sade. I spent a summer poring through my university library’s collection of jazz albums, listening to Stan Getz while I read Latin American fiction and slept on the floor of a college rental house. I couldn’t figure out how to get back that proverbial Bogota bus.

Over the last couple of years I decided to sit down and figure it out. After moving back to Venezuela, I ended up with a lot of moments where I needed to block out the distraction of the newsroom so I could focus on writing. I needed instrumental music because lyrics distracted me, which meant I suddenly had hours on hand to listen to jazz.

I decided to rediscover my intuitive relationship to jazz using the same non-intuitive approach I use for almost everything. I listened until I found the elements I liked and then listened to album after album until I had a core repertoire that I knew I’d just about always want to listen to. I gravitated toward a period, beginning in 1959 and stretching into the late 1960s, dominated by a sub-genre now known as modal jazz.

This style drew me in and didn’t let me go. It sounds to me like music that is somehow constantly shifting dimensions. It evokes the darkness and mystery of American blues, the lament of ethnic folk melodies, and an ambiguous calm that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’ve developed what I’ve come to think of as my own personal “Holy Trinity” of this style – saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianists McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. All three basically got their start working as sidemen for Miles or Coltrane, the founding fathers of modal jazz.

I listened to their albums chronologically, starting with their work in the early 1960s and continuing until the start of the 1970s, at which point their experiments with rock, synthesizers and African folk music start to lose my attention. When reading their memoirs, it was strange to find so many of my favorite albums treated almost as ­­afterthoughts to their later careers with fusion groups like Weather Report or as footnotes to their work as sidemen with Miles Davis. Many were quick recording projects that were hardly given a mention.

I do of course love other eras and styles of jazz. Modal jazz is the only one that I felt like I could explain why I liked it. This is admittedly contrary to the improvisational nature of jazz itself – I mean, it’s jazz, right? At the same time, I often feel that more people might listen to jazz if they weren’t given the sink-or-swim “c’mon, you’re supposed to just get it” introduction.

I’ve got no pretentions of being a jazz writer, or ever being featured in Down Beat magazine. This is not meant to be a definitive history of jazz (I recommend looking here for that). It’s not a story for experts; it’s a story about jazz and me. This is a story for people who think jazz may have something for them but feel like they’re lost in it.