An old jazz bassist is busking on the street. He’s totally seasoned, been around, and he’s just playing one note. Just one note over and over, and he’s feeling that one note, finding different ways to say something with that one note. A young guy, just out of college, comes up and says, “Hey, man, you know, I play bass, too. Just got my jazz performance degree. Can I play your bass?” The old man gives him his bass and says, “Sure.” So the kid takes the bass, and he starts shredding, playing as fast as he can, as many notes as he can, a total showoff. When the guy finally stops, the old man looks at him and says, “Still searching, huh?”

This joke, passed on to me by my friend Jacqueline Ultan, a superlative cellist, helped crystallize an aggravation about the misuse of jazz that has pestered me for some time. Jazz, the music of freedom and liberation, offers players a unique opportunity to express their feelings, their personal point of view, with no holds barred, but too often, it seems to me, this freedom becomes a platform not for self-expression, but for self-indulgence, for self-congratulation, for showing off.

My aggravation reached a high water mark not long ago when a press agent sent me the latest album from a young jazz artist on the rise. I had not heard his work and was excited to have the opportunity to check it out. The first track, an original tune, got off to a nice start before heading into this artist’s solo. About a minute into what would become a very long and tedious expedition, I had lost interest. The artist’s technical command was impressive, but despite the astonishing number of notes and the endless exploration of the harmonic possibilities, the solo left me cold. It tired my ears. It occurred to me that with the appropriate changes in tempo and key, this solo could be cut and pasted into any track. In short, it was generic. It was full of sound and fury, sure, but it signified nothing.

I got through the track, which, if memory serves, was unfortunately some 17 minutes long, and soldiered on to the next. Same thing. I gave up a minute or two into the artist’s solo and put the album aside, never to be heard again. No wonder people have difficulty with jazz, I thought. “Crazy people music,” as a friend of Branford Marsalis once complained.

Well, it’s not crazy people music, but for many people, it’s a hard-to-penetrate environment, and playing such as this does jazz no favors.

Baptism
I had some early contact with jazz via my parents’ record collection. They grew up with the big bands and had many recordings of the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and the like. I was more interested in rock and roll.

Around age 16, I was introduced to modern jazz when an older friend put on John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard album. “Check this out,” he said. I was knocked out. I had never heard anything like it, but it spoke to me. I bought the album the very next day, and it has remained in my rotation for decades. I also heard—where I’m not sure—some Thelonious Monk, which tickled me, and some Herbie Mann, which seemed pretty cool. (I actually once heard the two of them live on the same bill.) After I had gotten comfortable with Live at the Village Vanguard, I returned to the record store and asked them to recommend the most far-out Coltrane album available. I went home with Ascension. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and that album put an end to my jazz exploration for a time.

I returned to rock and roll pretty much full-time, but in college, I encountered Western classical music for the first time (not counting the music I sang in the choir as a boy). I began a years-long higgledy-piggledy exploration of that canon.

A few years later, visiting a friend in Santa Fe, I was introduced to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, via a compilation album put together by Joel Dorn, The Vibration Continues. I had the same reaction to it as I had had to the Coltrane album. It transported me, and it also entered the rotation permanently.

These albums were like atolls poking their heads up in a vast sea. I had no idea of what might lie below or beyond them, and oddly, I had no real curiosity about it. Jazz, for the most part, remained a foreign language largely incomprehensible to me.

A few years later, in New York City, I met Anthony, a bartender in a boutique restaurant near City Hall, who was training me as his relief. Anthony was deep into jazz, and knowing how much I was into music, he found it hard to believe that I knew nothing about jazz. Those two albums were really all I knew. I was completely ignorant of the music’s history and its cultural significance.

I explained to Anthony that jazz never really made much sense to me, aside from my very limited jazz library. I couldn’t hear it. He felt he needed to correct this glaring omission in my musical vocabulary, and he gave me an assignment. He told me to go to Tower Records and buy the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, give it a listen, and report back to him. So I got the album the next day—intrigued by Coltrane’s presence—took it home, put it on the turntable, lowered the needle onto the platter, and dropped into a whole new world.

Excellent choice, Anthony. Thanks. Coherent, deeply felt music played with an immediacy that stirs the soul. I was hooked and began a decades-long, ongoing investigation of jazz.

What all three albums share is playing from the heart, playing with intentionality, playing not just to communicate but to inform and enrich and entertain (the last a word whose Latin roots reflect “community”). These characteristics became for me the touchstone of quality jazz music—any music, when you get right down to it.

Don’t blow it
These shared characteristics apply to any worthwhile jazz performance. It does not matter if the music is free or tethered to changes, in or out, a burner or a ballad (though pointless soloing is much more likely in the former). All too often, however, once the head has been stated, players launch into blowing an improvisation that has little to do with what preceded it, does nothing to amplify what is already there. Young players are typically more guilty of this (“Still searching, huh?”), possibly from a desire to impress or from lack of experience. But no matter how technically brilliant a player might be, playing just to showcase that brilliance is more a circus act than a musical one.

As trumpet legend Bobby Shew likes to say, “You can play to impress, or you can play to inspire.”

In a 2014 interview, trumpeter Eric Vloeimans likened jazz to a conversation, but one that requires extremely sensitive participants because it’s a balancing act to stay on a truthful musical path. “The vibration is on a very thin course, where the music is very good or not so good at all,” he said. “If you dare to jump— If you want to make the connection with somebody else— It’s really making a connection, really going into the sound of somebody else. Really to dare. Exit your ego. [my emphasis] Your ego can be very good in wanting to play your instrument very well, but maybe sometimes the ego wants to play a high G on the trumpet or be very virtuoso, and the music doesn’t ask for that. It’s very interesting to play with people who can also let the music go its way, let the music exist . . . let the process show you the way and not want to prove something right away. Just let it be and see what there is.”

The late trumpeter Ron Miles addressed the tendency of jazz musicians to blow for the sake of blowing in a 2018 interview. He noted that in a typical jazz performance, the theme is stated and then you get to the blowing, which becomes the focus of the performance. He cited Ornette Coleman’s contention that musicians are too fixated on the background and not enough on the foreground, which is the melody, the song. Coleman wanted people to play the song and then their version of the song. “Keep the song going as long as you can,” said Miles. “You don’t have to worry about the form [the background]. It’s not as important as the song is. . . . We don’t want the song to ever end. It’s not like there’s a cutoff at the end of the song and the blowing starts. No. It’s all one continuous thing.” Miles knew how to keep that ball in the air, aloft on a cushion of mystery and wonder.

Miles also touched on another key to a successful jazz performance, noting that his Circuit Rider bandmates, guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, were selfless musicians who hadn’t already decided what the music should sound like. “So many times, as musicians, particularly schooled musicians, you kind of learn all the theory, you learn all the stuff, and you’ve already made decisions about the music before you’ve played it,” said Miles. (Or as an acquaintance, a veteran in the music industry, once said to me, “There are many people with jazz performance degrees, but few players.”)

In true improvisation, you can’t know what is coming, said Miles, “because nothing has happened yet. So if you can embrace the mystery, then you can really find your way and find something beyond the surface.”

My $0.02
It’s not easy to do, and it’s incredibly difficult to sustain it over the course of a song, much less an entire concert or career. But make the effort, jazz players. Please. It’s not about how many notes you can find. As Maestro Ron Carter might say, it’s about finding the right note for the moment.

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© 2022 Mel Minter