My friend, venerable music critic Michaelangelo Matos, has a good piece in Good magazine, titled, “Who’s A Dilettante?” It’s about how, despite the fact that he likes jazz, and listens to it, he’ll never be an expert on it. Which, for a critic, is sort of like admitting total defeat, because critics are supposed to be all-knowing-know-it-alls. And while Matos does a great job on most genres, he admits when listening to Duke Ellington:
Then I hit a wall. I listen to and like jazz, own a lot of albums.
If I put them on a shelf together, you might think I know something
about it. But I know squat, and listening to all that Ellington just
proved it further. Even allowing myself the luxury of writing about him
was a map so big you could never find its end, where would I begin? I
realized that however much I enjoy jazz, I’ll likely remain a
dilettante about it. And I discovered something else as well: this is
how I prefer it.
That made me laugh out loud. I sort of understand where he’s coming from, but I have a much more extreme relationship with jazz. If you looked at my music shelf, you might think it didn’t exist at all. Because I own no jazz. Purposely.
My father was a jazz musician. He played the bass. At one point he did it professionally, but then he grew up and got a real job in the casinos in Vegas and picked it up in his off hours. It was all the most severe noodlely instrumental stuff. Duke Ellington, who Matos writes about, figured prominently; so did Miles Davis, and some other people who I’ve totally blocked out.
I hated jazz. I hated the timbre of it—I like deep bass sounds (probably the only legacy Dad has left me)—and didn’t find the high-end, treble-centric tonality of it aesthetically pleasing. I didn’t like how it meandered all over the place, and I needed to hear vocals. Listening to jazz was sort of like eating broccoli as a child. You knew it was supposed to be good for you, but you didn’t like it, not one bit.
Of course, it didn’t help that whenever I was playing say, the latest Guns and Roses record, he would wander in and give me a lecture some 20 minutes long about how my music was garbage. He would then list the specifics. We did not have a great relationship. I was 16.
Later, when I had moved to New York, and was writing about dance music for the Village Voice, longtime Voice music critic Greg “Ironman” Tate was sitting nearby and writing on a computer. Somehow we got onto the subject of jazz, and I told him my little story, and he laughed at me. “You listen to today’s jazz,” he pointed out.
This was sort of true. Dance music is mostly instrumental, with long meandering sections that come back together at the end of the piece. I looked sheepishly at the floor and had to admit a certain amount of defeat. The Ironman was right. There was one thing that dance music favored in a way that jazz did not, though—and that was bass. But then, I realized, maybe, I was my father’s daughter after all.