Begin the Beguine (Or the Sanguine)
Wherefore art thou, lovers of great classical jazz?
I’ve gotten into the habit lately of embarrassing and boring the housemates and friends with my undying interest in ‘antiquities’. But it was their fault all along, I promise.
After all, once you’ve heard the quintessence of tone in classical jazz music and its succinctly expressed history of triumph and tribulation of its artist, you’ll know why my iPod has seen nothing from the top music charts of recent years. Add this to the mixing bowl with a dose of photographic evidence of America in its primal years of music and intertwined swing and bepop jazz culture and your picture is complete. In much the same way orchestrated music of all sorts stirs the potential within the soul for a sense of propriety, austerity, energy or entertainment, classical jazz fits the criteria above as well as beyond.
I was prompted to write when someone (who shall not be named) was brave enough to ask me who that ‘weird’ and ‘voracious’ scat singer was, booming with endless vitality through my desktop speakers; ’surely she’s out of breath by the third verse of “doo-dum dee dah”‘. Other times my housemates question the logic of Swinging or tapping in ragtime while cooking schnitzel or even pretending the mophead is a microphone for belting out the Cole Porter songbook. One innocent question about Ella Fitzgerald turns into a vocal digest of the upbringing and final hairstyle of the diva before her golden voice gave way to The Big Sleep (pun intended).
You might be interested to know that at the time of writing, I am listening to ‘Bird House’ by Miles Davis & Freddie Hubbard. It is well worth a listen.
To top it all off, just when you think I might be leaving on my computer overnight to download some hanky-panky for private time, much to her dismay, an 8.5GB documentary of jazz surreptitiously finds a spot on my hard drive. Can you blame me for wanting to find out why John Coltrane could transcend the boundaries of music into hard bop and singlehandedly inspire a new generation of music to come, or perhaps the history of racial inequality empowering the intensely haunting, passionate and tortured tone of Nina Simone?
Jazz music is so horribly addictive (so addictive in fact that you must dig up the classic artisans in their prime and embarrass yourself much the same way as I have. If you need recommendations, don’t hesitate to contact me.) for no matter how much literature I consult, I can never seem to get to the bottom of the dense pool of history behind it all. It’s impossible to take classical jazz simply as it is - you need only look at their attire, their cars and buildings and lights and glamorous fist fights to be reminded of the rich cultural history it embodies. Although it’s not possible to support jazz artists directly anymore, Verve and other dedicated jazz companies are reviving the titles of jazz saxophonists, trumpters, piansts and divas from vinyl to CD to be readily available to the public. Many of those diffuse in the world savour the crackle and pop of old records and the mistakes commonly occuring during live sessions of recorded jazz unlike modern studio replications of present day.
If you find yourself taken to classical jazz, convert your music from CD to lossless formats like .FLAC or .OGG and you will preserve the quality and vivacity of the recording as much as possible. When it comes to the dedication of reviving the dying musical art, you simply can’t buy that same dedication in restoration in record labels these days, and seldom do you find the same passion for the ecstacy of making music as once was.
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