jazz

In the entire conceivable history of music, there is hardly a blind spot for me, no period of time that was ever in short supply of music as inspired art. I listen to everything which I feel has some kind of musical merit, from the baroque era to the present. My late night internet/musical exploration journeys have taken me to quite foreign places aurally. You don't even wanna know the crazy shit I've listened to, and taken seriously. However, no form of major music, no matter how bizarre it is, has been as difficult and made me feel as diffident as that of jazz. Jazz music probably leaves behind the impression of soothing background music, when in fact jazz oftentimes achieves a great intelligence behind the songwriting along with a solo improvisation that some say approaches mystical contemplation and experience. I was looking through the liner notes of my specially remastered recording of Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," when I came upon Bill Evan's invaluable analogy between jazz improvisation and an ancient form of Japanese painting. The canvas is specially designed, almost in the form of an etch a sketch. When the artist draws a line, for example, it cannot be erased, so he must instead draw by complete intuition rather than through analytical means. Supposedly a certain essence of the artist is revealed that cannot be seen in paintings that aren't of such a liberal, spontaneous form. And that is precisely what we have in Jazz. Herein lies my interpretive problem. I dig the "never-resolved" sound of the 7th-chord harmonies; in fact, I find almost every track off Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool to be memorable in its infectious yet mellow hook. But as soon as the soloist enters the foray and launches off into a barrage of hybrid phyrgian and mixolydian scales, (yes, jazz musicians know their theory, too) i lose connection with the flow of the music. My opinion is inert, confused. I feel that the more I listen to it, and the more I grow in musical knowledge, the more I'll understand the nature of Jazz.