Chaise Beau

So I'm headed to Papa Jovino Santos-Neto's jazz show this Wednesday. Sweet! Live Music! An activity I love with a price tag I can seldom afford - which in a lot of ways makes it that much sweeter. Ah, here's to truisms. Anyhoo, Papa Jovino is a Brazilian-American musician and also my Tufts bud Ariel's dad. So I am pumped to hear some modern world-jazz and hopefully han gout with some Tuftsmen as well. Boo. Yay. Here's a holiday concert from NPR if you're aching for a preview.

So in preparation I've gone all jazz crazy. I just finished Ted Buehrer's How to Listen to and Appreicate Jazz, another set of CD's from the Modern Scholar series I checked out from the Morse Library. It turned out to be an excellent compliment to the other Jazz series I listened to recently - that one focused on some of the more technical aspects and differences between the various styles, whereas this one was much more of a personality-driven historical account. This one also spent less time dawdling in the origins of jazz (cakewalk, new orleans, etc.) and more time hitting the big names from those eras and then tracing their influence into other eras / styles. So it was cool to hear about the music as spillover of the artists' intentions and not just the formed-in-a-vacuum material characteristics of the music - not that that isn't a useful take, it just would've been overkill given the series I had already heard. I was very happy to dig into the innovations and various incarnations of bands - Miles Davis, for example, essentially traversed AT LEAST four different styles, maintaining his own signature soulful playing throughout. Even after listening to 20 hours of lectures and a bevy of samples, though, I'd still say I'm at a very newbie-ish stage - I will say that having a framework of style to place your listening into makes it vastly easier to really focus in on the music. I've only been trying to apply some of this newfound listening technique for the last week or so, and I'm already one, noticing a big difference, and two, starting to find focused, attentive listening to jazz to be a meditative / hypnotic experience - it's simultaneously easy to see why jazzheads get into it and why nonjazzheas don't. I fully admit that I've been a bigtime wannabe jazzhead for quite some time and am now starting to drift further that way...

Quick interjection - I have to warn everyone that whoever produced this lecture series did a HORRIBLE job. There are countless times when the professor misspoke, stopped recording, and then restarted his previous sentence. This is understandable- it's hard to speak flawlessly for hours at a time - but no one bothered to edit these screw-ups out of the finished mix. It would be as if I were talking It would be as if I were writing and I wanted to say I desired to say I desired to type something and I kept re-saying I kept re-typing it instead of just using instead of just hitting the backspace key. Hopefully you can appreciate how annoying this is - and as an added bonus, it makes you feel a little insane, little flashes of verifiable deja vu throughout your drive home.

So if you know anything about my personal history, which you don't, you would know (but you don't) that I get wicked manic-depressive style mania when it comes to new hobbies and collections and such and I have a real problem stopping myself. I get on big kicks, in other words, and just start scavenging. You can check my Phish bootleg collection for a direct and obvious example of this - the desire to be with the in crowd and have a working knowledge of those concerts far surpassed my rational side which was trying to politely inform me that even if I sat down for 14 consecutive days I would still not finish listening to all of those shows. This kind of behavior is fairly explicitly targeted by the likes of Grateful Dead, Phish or Bob Dylan archivists, who slowly release their heroin I mean old shows with full knowledge that we the bug-eyed masses will go running dollars in grubby fists. Bahstahds. Anyhoo, I bring all of this up because I got a bigtime jazz bug and had an overwhelming urge to go out and buy every recommendation I heard in the CD series or read about online.

This is not good. Fortunately, the college professor guy at the coffee shop the other day (he of the chatting up coffee cutie nature which so irked the iF) dropped a wiseman quote that I heard loud and clear, right about the time that this wave of purchase-desire had overcome me. I had just hit up Newbury Comics and picked up an Ornette Coleman LP (Free Jazz) and a Miles Davis LP (Seven Steps to Heaven). Classic addict's behavior - I can stop at one, no, I can stop at just two,t his is the last one, I promise, etc. But fate intervened - wise old professor (aka WOPpy McAdage) dude said "Don't buy what you can steal or borrow" with an air of authority suggesting a lifetime of hobo loneliness. I picture many a sandwich grifted.

So i've taken the advice and raided my local library plus put in about seventeen requests to the Minuteman system. So they'll be trickling in. And I'll probably keep blah-blah-blahing about them in the coming weeks. Maybe even throw in some feature track / album reviews. Who knows? I mean, there's a framework here to the blog, but not really any rules for what goes in it.

There are no wrong notes.

For now, though, I'll just leave with a hearty recommendation that you check out both of those academic intros to jazz and then partake of some of *one of* America's finest art forms. And consider this fair warning that if you thought posting about my baseball simulator's no hitter was nerdy, then you have no idea of the transcendent 30 year old living in his mom's basement essence I could drop on you if I start jazz-chatting on here. So fair warning, the theme could weave its way in. It's just the sentimental mood I'm in.