At last evening's performance by jazz guitarists John Scofield and Mike Stern at Variety Playhouse, I discovered something new about my self-nature.
What is it about me, I've wondered, that's made my musical mind so predominantly sequential and left it only ever-so-slightly veridical? To put the question in more common, everyday terms, why do I still continue, after all these years, all these decades, to constantly seek out new music, to still go to clubs to hear new music, despite the fact that I'm the age of the grandfathers of most of the audience at these events?
Why hasn't my musical taste crystallized at some point in my life like that of most people I know? Why am I not content to just continue to listen to the music of The Beatles and the Stones, or Bowie and Yes, or the B-52s and The Talking Heads, or The Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam? Why is it that, unlike almost everyone else I know, I'm still wanting to hear what's new, what's next, what's happening now?
In my mind, the answer would usually go something like, "I'm still constantly curious, because as a young man, I used to listen to . . ." and then I'd draw a blank. Who was it that taught me to be so musically adventurous? Frank Zappa? I listened to a lot of Zappa at one point in my life, roughly 1972 to 1976, and he certainly opened me to forms of music other than the rock to which I was predominantly listening, but I don't feel like he's had a lasting effect on my taste, just as his brand of maximalist music as fallen out of popular favor. Robert Fripp and Brian Eno certainly opened my ears and mind to still other forms of music, and for many years I felt like I had been studying at the feet of Professor Eno in particular, but why didn't my taste in music simply settle on their ambient experiments?
Then, listening to the jazz improvisations and explorations of Scofield and Stern last night, the answer came to me - the name to fill in the blank. "I'm still constantly curious, because as a young man, I used to listen to jazz."
There was a famously moribund period in rock history when the air waves were choked with disco and ultra-mellow, laid-back, California folk rock (Seals & Croft, the Eagles, Jackson Brown, etc.). In reaction, punk rock eventually exploded onto the scene, but in that long boring period before the punk explosion, I retreated from rock music altogether and became infatuated with jazz.
Living at the time on Long Island, it was easy to slip into New York City and hear still-living legends like Charlie Mingus and Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Vangaurd, or Sun Ra and Pharaoh Sanders at The Bottom Line. I got to see On the Corner-era Miles Davis live, as well as Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters, not to mention jazz-fusion pioneers like John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, and Joe Zawinul and Weather Report with Wayne Shorter. Roscoe, Lester, Joseph, Malachi, and Famoudou of The Art Ensemble of Chicago became my new John, Paul, George, and Ringo, replacing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in my imagination.
Now, here's the interesting thing about how jazz works: the music is typically improvisational, loosely based around some standard song or original composition, or just a mere chord progression. The ear of the listener engages with the mind of the performer, and as the musician surprises us with unexpected twists and turns in the lines being played (or sometimes surprises us by playing the exact lines that we expect), the sequential system in the mind lights up.
Listening to jazz for years as I did, one exercises one's sequential neurons to the point where the veridical pleasure of a familiar passage of music seems like a pretty weak cup of tea. After 10 years of sonic exploration with the masters of avant-garde jazz, followed by a return to rock only when punk and new wave were providing something new and different to hear, my mind became so overpoweringly sequential that it could never again settle for the familiar and the expected. Contentment could no longer be found in the known; pleasure existed only in going where my ears had never gone before.
I know very little of this has anything to do with Scofield and Stern's performance last night, except in the most tangential way. Their show last evening was great, masterly and tasteful, and full of improvisation, extrapolations, and sequential surprises and pleasures. Their set included standards (Moonlight In Vermont) and originals, and they performed two full sets, just like the jazz masters I used to hear in the Big Apple clubs back in the day. I don't think anyone could have left wanting anything more from these two master jazzmen.
But as I've said, listening to their playing and following the lines they were laying down, I suddenly realized that no rock musician made me the way I am today. But if you go to a jazz concert, you'll see all kinds of people, men and women, black and white, young and old, all joined together for the common purpose of enjoying the music, of hearing something spontaneously created in the moment. Those were my formative experiences, and why I don't feel out-of-place or at least too self-conscious going out to hear the latest indie rock band among an audience of 20-year-olds, even if I may resemble Chris Rock's joke about that one guy in the club waaaay to old to be there.
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