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Jazz

The Source

I have a friend named Brock…a tall, slender sophomore at Routt Catholic, who is probably as close to a prodigy as anyone I’ve ever met. The victim of only a few years’ piano lessons, his greatest talent is innate more than learned. He conquers a Scott Joplin piece then turns it on its head. He’ll master a bit of Mozart then flip it inside out, making it his own. Brock doesn’t play the piano, he gets inside it, he makes it dance. Firemen tell tales of house fires in which the piano keyboard was left intact. This is lie. I’ve seen ivory smoke under Brock’s pyrotechnic fingers. Which made me wonder why I don’t much care for jazz. Brock likes jazz. I listen to Brock play jazz and tell him, “Hey, I really like that.” I’m not exactly lying. I mean, I don’t dislike it…it just …well…like celery. I don’t get it. I keep inwardly shouting “Who stole the melody?” This is not a condemnation of jazz. Heck, it’s the only truly American form of music, really intelligent people love it, and it takes a skill of both music and improvisation that few musicians ever manage to put together in one talented package. But it’s always left me cold and I’ve wondered why. Until I got on the elevator in Peoria. I had been hired by the Kiwanis to play for their state convention. Two days of honky-tonking for various banquets and programs. I’d do a gig in the banquet room, hang around Peoria for a few hours, then show up for their dinner meeting. A nice gig aside from the fact that I was stuck in downtown Peoria for long periods of time. On the second evening of the convention I climbed aboard the elevator en route to the awards’ banquet and it all became clear. The elevator was filled with the sound of jazz music piped in from somewhere and suddenly my teeth started to ache. The dentist. Ever since I was old enough to grow my own teeth, my parents took me to a Jacksonville dentist who had jazz playing in the background all during those dreaded minutes in the waiting room, all the time I nervously clutched the arms of Dr. Herr’s chairs awaiting his arrival, and then jazz accompanied every x-ray, drilling, filling, and extraction I ever suffered in that seat of horror. That was it. Somewhere between the third and fourth floor of the Pere Marquette Hotel of Peoria I discovered the “root” cause of my dislike for jazz. It had been the background music for the most dreaded moments of my young life. Which made me wonder if my other likes and dislikes in music had similar origins. Rock music bores me a bit. I played in a rock and roll band through the sixties and seventies and after the initial thrill was gone, our main concern about a gig was “How far do we have to drive to get there?” and “Is it another third floor dance without an elevator and tons of equipment?” I think that’s it. Rock and roll wore me out. I love Wagner and Tchaikovsky but can become bored by the time intermission rolls around in a Mozart concert. That makes no sense. Any musicologist will rate Mozart at the top of any musical heap, but he has the same effect of me as Nyquil, the cold medicine. Now that I’ve started psychoanalyzing my musical tastes I think this slight perversion can be traced back to the Bugs Bunny cartoons that featured the biggest and brassiest Wagnerian music. Sorry Amadeus, blame it on Elmer Fudd. Gospel music? Love it. Four-part harmony. Simple, three-chord stuff and I can’t get enough of it. There’s nothing complicated about gospel music, nothing especially intricate. Not to show any disrespect to those who sing it extremely well, but practically anyone can sing it. So how come my enjoyment whenever four men kick into “I’ll Fly Away”? I think it goes back to Fishhook, Illinois, and the annual Sunday School convention where gospel singing was mixed in with a little preaching and a whole lot of fried chicken and cornballs. That was the only place I could get my grandma’s fried cornballs. Somehow The Blackwood Quartet and the Singing Lester Family got all mixed up with crispy, lard-fried breading in my adolescent musical mind. Folk music? One of my favorite genres. When I grow up I still want to be Pete Seeger. Why? Again, I guess I’ll blame my growing up as a child of the sixties. The whole world was protesting one thing or another but at Illinois College we skipped the peace marches and draft card burning and went to the really important national issues: compulsory attendance at the college’s chapel services, and being forced to wear a tie to eat on Wednesday nights. Our student body president spent a week underneath his desk in Crampton Hall and wouldn’t come out. I guess we showed them. That was pretty much the extent of our radicalism, but we always thought it’d be cool to go to Woodstock or march to Selma, or …well…something, dog-gone it. I like folk music. And it was Pete Seeger who said, “There’s no such thing as bad music. The very term is an oxymoron.” I guess he’s right. And I’m glad Brock’s dentist didn’t fill his waiting room with jazz.