As a teenager I was ‘played’ by music like everyone else, allowing it to heighten my exuberance and deepen my moodiness. But this was all unconscious. Music fits in seamlessly with our hormonal and social cycles and phases in our youth, blending in with the background subcultures we attach ourselves to and the pensive and philosophical modes we discover reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles for English class. Like everyone else, I was listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Good tunes. Lots of fist-shaking and irreverence.

An older friend of mine, now touring with his bass, took pity on my lost soul, thinking I might like to broaden my artistic horizons. He himself had been turned on to Jazz Fusion by a couple of his music instructors, the very ones I would soon be listening to, and he in turn graced me with a handed-down cassette tape, even then a well-outdated format. I did not find it terribly interesting. It lacked a consistent melodic pattern and thump, thus failing to fire my synapses. And if this really was Jazz, why wasn’t it more, you know…“smooth”? The guitar seemed to be talking too much, and I wanted it to straighten itself out and sing. There was so much confusion, as if the musicians didn’t know the proper roles of each instrument, or weren’t sure where the song was going.

I had listened to the whole tape, absentmindedly, a couple of times. Then, as I was driving, I heard a random tapping I couldn’t locate. I knew I had heard this tapping before, perhaps even on this same stretch of highway. What in the world would make the car do that? Bingo. I rewound the tape and there it was: Tap. Tap-Tap…Tap. Ok, the drummer was hitting the side of the drum or a piece of wood, but why would it be so random? And why did it fade in so oddly over a guitar solo that it had nothing to do with? This music was not blending in with the background and rhythms of my world, but rather pulling me into its world. Rather than leaning back, tapping my foot, and bobbing my head, this made me sit up and lean in.

The tune was “Renegade,” on Tribal Tech’s Nomad. And through it, I discovered Jazz. But I found the learning curve steep, particularly on a tape already deteriorated though repeated play, and I was perhaps more than ordinarily dense musically. High school band had not prepared me for this. It was like straining to eavesdrop on a conversation, trying to recognize words I was anticipating based on the few un-muffled bits I could hear. As I played the tape again, this time with attention and a determination to listen to the music on its own terms, it opened up for me a three-dimensional world of color and movement.

I found Jazz to be unlike anything I had listened to before. It had such an inner complexity that I would try to tune into a single instrument throughout each piece. I could listen to each track four or five times, and feel like each one was different. Each instrument was utterly independent of the others, and yet I could see one building toward another, then intertwining and bouncing off each another. The drums could not be held to predictable fills, and the bass insisted on speaking for itself. It was exhilarating.

I won’t bother with the zeal of my conversion as I developed an ear for the music, or the heartrending tales of searching for unobtainable albums before iTunes. The important part is the bliss of listening and really hearing it. Unlike pop music, which can quite easily stir the emotions, Jazz also stirs the mind. It cannot be listened to passively.

One of my favorite quotations is something Igor Stravinsky wrote when discussing the process of writing music. He says:

“I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. . . .Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom? To what shall I cling in order to escape the dizziness that seizes me before the virtuality of this infinitude? . . . I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that strong and weak accents are within my reach, and that in all of these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that had just frightened me. It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal twelve sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust.” (Poetics of Music, 63-65.)

For me, Stravinsky here reaches beyond even music, but that’s different story. In context, he’s talking about the liberties and constraints of music, and the liberties in the constraints. He goes on to discuss even ‘surrounding himself with obstacles.’ Jazz is just that. It is exploring the multi-dimensional shape and topography of musical space. Truly dizzying.