First, I’d like to thank all the beautiful readers who have been writing me such nice letters lately. I am happy to say those long, thought-out responses still come from me, and not some responsebot.
Secondly, I’d like to tell you about the only letter I ever wrote to a columnist. It was a letter in praise. It was to The Globe and Mail’s Russell Smith, a person I know a little from years when I was living in Toronto. Russell never wrote me back. Not that I still remember.
The column he wrote, which I adored, was about being frustrated by jazz music. It might have even been about quite disliking jazz. It appeared some time in the summer of 2005, and I have tried finding it online all morning, but to no avail. In it, there was a whole bit about being a fan of what Smith called “serious” music (classical and baroque to me and you), and how that type of music was becoming increasingly hard to find on CBC Radio.
I admit I could be, and probably am, remembering this entirely wrong. Especially with the overlay of recent years, which have made classical music near-impossible to find on CBC Radio (unless you count five daily gum-snapping hours where the truly misguided, cringe-inducing theme seems to be “let’s talk about Mozart and Mendelssohn as if they are pop stars — and let’s talk really, really loudly! We’ll use slang! The kids will love that!”)
But back to — and I am sure this will come as a surprise — the point of this column: not being into jazz. Russell Smith, if ageing memory serves, does not love it. And neither do I.
It was hard to admit back when I was a music writer. People would say, “You can’t be in the business of popular music without appreciating jazz.” To which I can now say, “Wrong,” because I did it, I believe well, for a pretty long time. (And P.S.: I also don’t like the blues.) But now I can let my little bitter flag fly.
Yesterday, I was walking on Ste-Catherine Street, through the encampment of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, marvelling at their extremely Montrealish take on security (one teenaged girl asking to look into the bags of thousands of people passing through a narrow gate decorated with saxophone-playing cats), and construction. (Major on-site roadwork as millions descend on Ste-Catherine Street. Brilliant). And I wondered, what was it about this music that so offended me?
I think in truth it’s more a matter of aesthetics than sound. There are some jazz sounds that I like. I can get with Nina Simone on a balmy summer midnight as well as anybody else. I like a few weird things like Moondog, and the odder ends of Miles Davis do appeal. So you see, my ears are not as philistinic towards the big J as the rest of me.
Really, I’m just riffing here, but I ask myself whether maybe it isn’t more the jazz scene itself. I find the jazz scene somehow depressing, in the same way that I find the comedy club scene depressing: the seriousness, the snobby upholding of the live experience above all else, the hackneyed authenticity of the brick wall, the nerdy, generally white, generally male trainspotter feel of the audience, the never-ending noodling onstage. I don’t like prog rock or jam bands for the noodling, either.
And of course jazz is historic, reaching far back into the 20th century, and for all I know the 19th, but there is something inveterately late-’80s — and not in a good way — about nearly every jazz club I’ve seen (admittedly not many): the small thinning ponytails and vests and black jeans and saxophone pins and the whispering people who might not give up smoking because they don’t want to lose their “whisky voice.”
That being said, I am not completely unexposed to jazz music. Over the past couple of years, I have received more of what I might call “accidental exposure” than ever before, and this brings me back to the CBC.
I most reliably listen to the radio at about 8 p.m. This tends to be when I am finished work, and in the kitchen, preparing dinner. It’s also when both CBC Radio 2 and Radio Canada’s Espace Musique go into full-frontal jazz mode. The CBC’s Katie Maloch is no doubt a wonderful broadcaster, one of those Canadian radio treasures, in fact, but I cannot handle Tonic, the show the CBC has put her on in the last few years.
With Tonic, which is on weeknights at 8, I go through the same thing nearly every evening I am home. I last about 20 minutes of its tinkly-tonkly light jazz programming and then try to find something else on the radio. I then hear that Radio Canada is playing pretty much the same business, and that it’s only Rihanna and Justin Bieber and French Canadian roque everywhere else, and I finally get my laptop from my office so I can listen to BBC Radio 3 through my computer’s tinny, terrible speakers. I then return to my food preparation without feeling like I want to murder the sound source in my kitchen.
And so that is my less-than-satisfying screed. Just as I hate fish, and the colour orange, I hate jazz, what might qualify as the primary musical food-group in the great American songbook, and I have no great idea why. But at least after this column runs, I will never again need to make up excuses as to why I cannot go to the Montreal Jazz Festival with you, not even if you have an extra ticket, or an extra VIP pass, or kids who are dying for my hand to hold at an outdoor show (an open-air experience that I might slide down a razor blade into a pool of rubbing alcohol to avoid). Now, people will just know not to ask. My curmudgeonly cat is out of the bag, and she won’t get along with the saxophone-playing ones on those security fences.
Source: National Post
No comments:
Post a Comment