Jazz is


Original composition date lost    |    etc    no date    2024 +    2025    entries    home

I love jazz and I love to sing it, but I don't for one second imagine that it - like any genre of music - is everyone's cup of tea. There's some jazz that's pretty hard to swallow, like scat and bebop. Which I still think are the main reasons why most folks who say they don't like jazz think they don't like it. If that was the only jazz I'd ever heard, I probably wouldn't like it either.

Jazz can be an incredibly complicated thing when you're trying to take certain aspects of it, and certain kinds of it, apart. You really do need some music education on that one - time signatures and scales and such. But I'm going to dispell a myth that I saw someone try to perpetrate yesterday, and it's the same sort of myth that "artiste elites" try to push on people.

Jazz is not only for the music educated. You don't have to know jack squat to enjoy jazz. Much like you don't need a degree in art history to enjoy art. That phrase so many disparage, "I don't know much about art but I know what I like," is a perfectly legitimate response to looking at an artwork - because it's visceral, it's an innate reaction to something a person is looking at, and that's really all a lot of artists want. In fact, that was the very point of some schools of modern art that came out of New York post-WWII. Some of those artists wanted to create things that could be experienced rather than understood.


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