Jazz Is For Ordinary People
(An article about jazz but also a jazz-inflected banger of a tune by Berlioz)
Recommended Listening While Reading:
In This Moment by Sam Kirmayer
Transcendência by Anderson Farias
Even When I’m Dreaming by Mike Bruzzese
Crayola by Chopping Spree
It’s hard to talk about jazz without being pretentious. I always think of the joke of Ryan Gosling mansplaining jazz to both a woman, and most unfortunately, a black man, in La La Land - and I’ve certainly found myself opening conversations about jazz with “well, not to mansplain jazz to you, but…” Keep in mind too, I’m nowhere near an expert. I’m just some white guy who plays drums in a punk band and happens to listen to and love a lot of jazz. So, if you’ll allow me to Gosling you for a moment…thanks.
I feel like there’s so much lost in translation with the jazz genre when you haven’t experienced it live. I was fortunate enough to experience live jazz almost weekly when I lived in Montreal a few years ago - there was a pretty active jazz scene where I lived in St. Henri (for a while I lived just a block away from where Oscar Peterson grew up, funny enough). On our street alone, every weekend we had multiple opportunities to see live jazz performed for free, whether it was at jazz brunch at the café up the road, or at the regular Sunday night jazz jam at Pub Epoxy, a typical dive bar save for some particularly lovely mood lighting and a backline drum kit.
As mentioned, I don’t play anywhere near jazz in my musical life - I’ve always been drawn, when performing, to heavier music. The power and energy you feel playing that kind of music was always addictive to me, a feeling I couldn’t replicate anywhere else. That said, getting to see jazz performed right in front of me on a regular basis really changed my view on playing drums. Seeing how expressive and melodic it can really be, and how that intense energy I felt could be channeled and replicated in different forms was eye-opening. Watching the body language and musical communication between the players is even more engaging and interesting than the music itself sometimes, something often lost to me on record. I remember distinctly watching a performance at the Epoxy jam once where the pianist, whether intentionally or just lost in the music, went way over his time to solo. Even I, at the time fairly new to the genre in general, could feel the energy in the room shift, and watching the members of the band struggle to communicate the next movement of the song sonically and through body language while still maintaining the heartbeat of the song was strangely vulnerable and electrifying all at once.
The way this type of music is performed and can evolve in real time has fascinated me since I started diving into the genre. It’s especially wild to me given how alien the form of performance is when considered against the way songs in almost all other genres are composed. I always thought of it as ‘structured improvisation,’ as the open mic jams would always follow a formula - each song had a set structure, a hook or melody or motif to anchor it, and a set number of bars for each player to improvise in within its structure. You could play the same song a hundred times in a row and it would never be the same. You truly feel the unbounded creativity and passion the form allows and encourages in the live setting. I’ve long been allergic to overplaying in music, but in a sense, jazz is designed for it, and the energy, passion and intensity of it really shines through live. I know a lot of people think of jazz as passive, easy-listening background music, which it can be - my recent favourite of this style is the Red Garland’s Piano record with Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, a record that is beautifully soft, expressive in its performances and has a wonderful vibe, while never feeling cheapened or restrained like some smooth-jazz can - but at the heart of it the genre was never meant to be passive or easy listening. It’s pure expression and passion, the players pushing and pulling each other. Especially in its live form, the improvisation, the communication, the sonic mix of collaboration, confrontation and conflict is alive and tactile and exciting and vibrant.
Well, maybe alive isn’t the right word. The jazz is dying conversation has been going on for decades, longer than I’ve been alive, certainly. I saw it firsthand with some of the incredible players I got to watch in Montreal. The epoxy jam nights were overflowing with talent, but it always felt closed off - every Sunday night would be eight to twelve players, watching and waiting for their turn, and then myself and a couple friends in the back watching. Nothing more. It was a kind of echo chamber, never opening up and reaching people who were outside the jazz scene but curious about it (at least during my time attending). It’s a shame, because we met some amazing people with so much potential, and it felt like their work was consistently disappearing into the void, only seen by friends and other jazz players, fantastic recordings enjoyed by fellow players and a select few jazz heads, but quickly disappearing into the streaming abyss and never making the mark they could, and perhaps should, culturally. This is not isolated to the genre of course, but in a genre long past its peak of cultural relevance and increasingly moving into more and more niche territory, it feels particularly exacerbated and unlikely to ever break out.
When I moved back to Vancouver, I fell out of the rhythm of seeing live jazz on a regular basis, a symptom of it not being as readily available as it was to me out east. So, I was incredibly surprised and excited by what I found back in October 2024 when I went down to the Biltmore Cabaret for Versus, an event run by the UBC music collective Blank Vinyl Project. Versus was a genre-fluid battle of the bands event, the prize being a spot at the collective’s annual Goosehunt festival. Of the many great bands that played, the clear standout was Chopping Spree. Chopping Spree is a self-described jazz fusion group formed by members of local bands Reverend Ape (guitarist Junny Chen and drummer Eddie Naranjo) and Felisha and the Jazz Rejects (bassist Olivier Leclerc), as well as saxophonist Kyler Young, percussionist Colm McIntosh and keyboardist Hayden Cohen - all mainstays of and revered (no pun intended) members of the local music scene here in Vancouver. The group plays a high-energy form of jazz fusion, drawing clearly from Junny and Eddie’s interest in metal and a wide range of other genres. That said, what really blew me away was that the band closed out their set with a cover of Caravan. For those unaware, Caravan is a jazz standard dating back to 1936, performed by many of the greatest artists in jazz history, and semi-recently re-popularized from its use in the movie Whiplash. The crowd was already firmly within the band’s grip by the time they were ready to close with this track, but when Caravan kicked in, something changed. The attendees had been moving throughout the set, but as the song went on, the crowd got wilder and wilder, pushing and shoving and dancing together in a collective pit of increasing chaos and exultation. I’ve always made the joke that people at local shows in Vancouver will mosh to anything, which is sort of true, but nonetheless, this was incredible to witness. It was a young crowd, skewing heavily towards UBC students as far as I could tell, and, based on the rest of the lineup and a few brief conversations, I think it’s safe to say not full of die-hard jazz fanatics or historians. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t need to understand the history and the mechanics of jazz. They didn’t need to know who Dizzy Gillespie is, or Duke Ellington, or Art Blakely. The power and joy and intensity of the music spoke to them on its own terms. Bringing the passion and spirit of jazz to a receptive setting of young people ready to have a good time worked wonders, and I felt in that moment a kind of universality I hadn’t experienced seeing live jazz before. The music can be studied academically or enjoyed passively, but at the end of the day, the roots of jazz, the heart of jazz, was always in a setting not unlike what I experienced: young people coming together and being moved, physically and spiritually, by the power and raw passion of the music.
I think it’s easy for modern jazz players to get lost in an insular world of their own. The form still has some relevance - just look at BADBADNOTGOOD, Ezra Collective, Berlioz, lofi hip-hop. There are many artists using and reworking the sounds of jazz, combining it with hip hop, house music, electronica and so much more. Matthew Halsall and Gondwana Records in Europe are one of many labels putting out all kinds of new and exciting forms of jazz and its offshoots into the world. But for young millennials and Gen-Z, it certainly does feel to me that the impact of the genre is diminishing every day. But I firmly believe that jazz doesn’t need to be translated to be enjoyed. Jazz is not archaic, or staid, or in need of a fundamental sonic shift or compromise to make sense to younger or newer audiences. Jazz was, and still can be youth culture on its own merits and its own terms. It’s free. It’s messy. It’s rebellious. It’s movement. It’s not pretentious - in fact, it’s got a hell of a punk rock spirit to it if you ask me.
I believe there’s a place for jazz in every local scene. If Chopping Spree can play Caravan to a rapt audience and a massive mosh pit at a show with a bedroom pop artist, a garage rock band and a psychedelic prog rock group at a battle of the bands, a jazz group can play Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars at a folk gig. It’ll work. You can play Oscar Peterson’s Place St. Henri at an indie rock show. It will translate. Jazz can be put into so many contexts; it’d be a shame to keep boxing it up and not let a twenty-year-old at a DIY show experience it the way it was meant to be experienced. If you play jazz, or you want to, start a band and go play an underground gig to a bunch of teenagers and punk rockers. It will work.
Jazz, like folk, or punk, or hip hop, is a means of communication. Live music is a feedback loop. The energy the artist puts out is received by the audience and returned, constantly, in a recurring loop. Vibrant, raw, human energy. That’s not genre dependent. The message may be different, but that conversation is universal. That’s why we perform. That’s why we listen. That’s why we watch. That raw energy, emotion and passion will always translate.