Zemblan Grammar

I thought and thought and thought about what I was going to tell you about John Coltrane and bop and jazz, and I just didn’t know what to say. This is what I wound up writing.

Oh boy, you guys, I had the best thing I was going to show you — an excerpt from a book I was reading that really said a lot of what I thought ought to be said about bop, but I certainly didn’t have it with me the other day at Temp Job, and as it turns out, I don’t have it here at home, either. The damned thing must be in my office, so it looks like I am going to have to rely on my own self, and I am not feeling especially eloquent tonight. I’ll find that passage and show it to you eventually, but for now I will just tell you how I learned the secret, elusive jazz language, which is not at all secret or elusive, in fact.

Like The Kilowatthour, I heard a lot of jazz growing up. Jazz was just another thing we listened to at home, along with the Simon and Garfunkel, CSN(Y), Bob Dylan, Beethoven, and The Carpenters (heh). I played around with music as a kid, but wasn’t especially serious: I spent a while in Suzuki piano lessons (dude, why do they not teach you to read music? WHY, MISTER SUZUKI, WHY?), and of course played the recorder in school–that utterly useless instrument designed, I’m sure, to aid elementary school students in torturing their parents.

It’s a good thing I had instruments as an outlet, though, let me tell you, because I can not, absolutely can not sing. By the time I was in public school where they have Actual Band and not just legions of squeaky recorders rasping out “Greensleves” at every single concert, I had decided to play the flute, mostly because it was small and pretty and that was what the other girls were going to play. Later, as I listened to more and more jazz on my own, and studied and played, I realized that the flute wasn’t working for me, and to make the kind of sound I wanted to make, I was going to have to go big. Very big. That was when I started playing the baritone sax, which (you must all admit) is approximately a million times cooler than the flute. Not even Jethro Tull can really make the flute cool; I’m sorry but I have said it.

So I switched instruments, and, in large part, taught myself the saxophone (it’s not hard) and started being serious about it. I went back to Stanford’s jazz camp, where I had been the summer before with my painfully uncool flute, and kept being serious about it. We studied theory and history and musicianship and got comfortable with chord patterns and modes, and we played with Real Actual Musicians (I mean the lucky people who somehow eek out a living playing jazz). I stuck out like a sore thumb, not just because of my southern accent, but because I was playing an instrument that was mostly dominated by large black dudes, and I was a small, pale little snippet of the Alfina you see today, playing a sax roughly the size of my entire body. I kind of liked that.

This may be the dorkiest thing I have ever revealed about myself, but band camp–jazz band camp!–was completely awesome. My parents were always finding ways to feed my creativity, and that was definitely one of the highlights. I was so inspired by it all that for a while I entertained the idea of becoming a professional myself, as I think everyone does who has ever fallen in love with some art form, but in the end I decided to go where the big money is and become an academic. I learned so much while I was there, and it was the kind of knowledge that stuck, because after I went home I kept studying and practicing and listening.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? The listening. Although at camp I learned more of the ins and outs of the stuff than I could previously have imagined, that wasn’t what “got” me to like jazz. After all, I was already there, wasn’t I? All the way across the country with my huge-ass saxomophone all hello I am going to play some jazz now please. I loved jazz already, partly because it was basically the best thing you could play with a “band instrument” (no offense to those who are into the Sousa marches and all–which, incidentally, also received quite a bit of airtime on the Vague Family Stereo, because that is how we roll), but mostly because it was part of the musical landscape of home: familiar and lovely and comfortable.

Bop, on the other hand, is anything but familiar and comfortable — at least not unless you make it that way, or not until you can. As a wise anonymous commenter stated, bop is flirting with or embracing, even, the unexpected. It can be a little unsettling, even for someone who grew up listening to jazz, especially if the jazz you grew up listening to is of the swing or West Coast cool jazz variety. Bop reaches a sort of raw, untamed place that West Coast cool jazz can’t — I like my Dave Brubeck and all, but experimenting with time signatures, clever though it is, doesn’t always dig that deep. I know some readers will disagree with me on this one, but I think that kind of West Coast cool jazz is like the jazz equivalent of progressive rock: it requires a lot of technical mastery and even innovation, but not a lot of soul. While I’m at it, I’ll just say the same thing about John McLaughlin: not a lot of soul, you know?

Bop, though, oh bop. It’s like a heated conversation among the musicians and the audience, a tripping-over of words, missteps and backtracking and re-evaluating and strengthening the point, and a pounding of fists on the table. In that way it’s a challenge to the listener; it’s showing off and muscle-flexing, but in a much more real way than the cool jazz dudes do it, I think. It’s raw chops–not chops in the general sense of “technical skill” but in the more specific, physical sense, like the muscles you develop from playing an instrument–and in the case of Coltrane and the sax, I am thinking of this one weird damned lower-lip muscle that never really goes away. It’s physical. Oedipa’s comment got at this point: it fits the rhythm of breathing; it’s tied up with the body itself (dirty!), not just because, say, the sax is a wind instrument, but because its phrases are allowed to be connected to the body in a different way than the phrases of swing or cool jazz might be. It’s intensely human in an unpolished and wonderful way.

Now that I’ve said all that, I read back and see that it sounds like I am trying to say bop is some chaotic mess of formless emotional upchuck, and there I may have gone too far. [I am making an ass of myself by even attempting to write about music (music is something about which I feel strongly, but for largely nonsensical reasons), but I am this far in and I am not stopping now! I'm surprised you have even made it this far.] Anyway, bop, I will stress, is not some kind of jumbledy pile of sounds, oh no. Those guys have the kind of physical chops I mentioned before, but they also have the technical chops, which you can hear if you listen to those fucking impossible runs of notes in “Countdown.” Look at a transcription of that on paper and you’ll see something that would put fear into the heart of any player, but you’ll also see something that makes sense.

Coltrane in particular is capable of producing a tone that is richer, warmer, smoother, and more complex than any other player I have ever heard, ever. It’s impossible and wonderful and you want to sink down deep in its cushiony envelope and let it swallow you whole and never come back out. On top of that the man is so fucking nimble of finger that he must have extra joints; so nimble that I was going to make a rather lewd remark here, but I will hold off, because parental units are reading. (Hi! And thank you.) Put an axe in the man’s hands and he can make it do anything you want, things you never thought of, things you couldn’t imagine, and, yes, probably some things you might not like. If you buckle yourself in, though, you might find that it is, while sometimes terrifying, incredibly exhilarating in the manner of those old Memorex ads. Your face might get stuck that way. [I hope you know the image I'm referring to, because it is not to be found on the entire internet!]

In retrospect, while I think “Countdown” is the ideal two-minute representation of what Coltrane can do when the bop gets in him, it is maybe not the best introduction to his music for someone who isn’t an active jazz listener. For that person, I would choose “Good Bait,” off Soultrane, which is the first Coltrane song and the first Coltrane album I ever fell in love with. I have introduced others to Coltrane via “Good Bait,” and one of those others went on to become a formidable font of jazz knowledge, and then later to adopt a big, sad-eyed, mad-wailing, black-and-tan coon hound and name him Coltrane. I think that is enough to recommend this song.