The scene about the mix tape was not available, so I had to post this one. It’s funny, huh? I like this movie, if for no other reason than that it explained everything about a friend of mine. Plus too there was a time when this was that to which I aspired and to this day it does not look all bad. If I did not know a lot of people who know a lot more than me about music, I would think that I know a lot about music. I know more about jazz than many people I know. That doesn’t mean I know a lot about jazz. That doesn’t mean I won’t tell you what I think about jazz.
Beginning with the fact that a good hard look at any genre will cause that genre to become indistinct, potentially to the point of being obscured. We can all pretty much agree that Charlie Parker played jazz, right? He certainly played bop, or be-bop depending on who says it. Is that jazz? It wasn’t until he and his contemporaries played it. There was all dixieland before that. Dixieland and blues.
So which did the jazz come from? Yes. So there already you have a tree with two trunks and everybody knows not to try to cut that down and bring it into the house for Christmas. And the same thing with jazz. It lives in its own space and rather than figuring out what it is, I prefer to appreciate that it is. Then again, I like poems that don’t rhyme or “mean anything.”
Maybe you like for your poems to rhyme. Maybe I am a pseudo intellectual with snobbish tendencies. Maybe we should spend some time listening to jazz. I’d like to do that. Like now.