Contemplating Jazz

Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at "hateful ragtime" no longer passes for musical culture.
-- Scott Joplin, 1908

Wednesday, May 14, 1997.

Because I am not fond of the book that is currently being read aloud on Radio Reader, I switched to the other public radio station in town, which plays jazz. I am surprised by how much I am enjoying listening to it. I was in a jazz band my whole time at college, which was great fun. I played trombone, which was not the smartest instrument choice for me to have made. My arms are too short to ever really play at a professional level. I was good enough to be in the band, though, even if I did have to start out in the second level band.

But I haven't listened to a lot of jazz since those days. I think one of the reasons I wanted to be in the band in college was that my main teacher, the trombone professor, was the head of the jazz program. The second level band had the horn professor as the director. We really worked hard, and I had a ways to go in jazz styling, since we hadn't had a jazz band in high school. Dr. Cryder took real pains to inculcate swing into us.

I have also always liked the camaraderie of being in a band. It's great to feel part of the group, to hang with the guys in my section. Being in the music school was like being at a small college within a large university, since we had so many classes together and played together in so many different groups.

So now, since listening to CDs is part of my regimen at work, I've been looking for recordings of some of the charts we played. Some of the best, the most exciting, were original arrangements, it comes back to me now. So I guess I won't be finding that powerful setting of Chick Corea's "Spain," since it was Dr. West's or Dr. Cryder's creation. Funny that the version I did buy, which was Corea and Return to Forever, his own group, didn't live up to my memory.

Still to be bought: Toshiko Akioshi's Big Band and that band that only played on Monday nights in Greenwich Village.

So to me, jazz doesn't come with the baggage of smoky nightclubs or heroin. It transports me back to the mid-70s, when I was working on it, studying, trying to work up my nerve to solo. We got in the groove and swung, sometimes!

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