Lkeller said:
Yeah - I guess so. Speaking only for myself - I've never understood why jazz is so inaccessible for so many people. Disclaimer: I'm not a musician, though I played classical piano as a kid for about 5 years, so maybe I'm slightly more sophisticated that the average listener.
Compare music to food. The vast majority of people are very happy eating a Big Mac. It's satisfying. It's easily accessible. It's uniform wherever it's made. Well, the vast majority of people like music that is satisfying, easily accessible, and uniform. I play button accordion at parties and on the street and at farmers' markets and the like. I get the biggest tips and the most appreciation for the simplest of songs and the songs that spark pleasant memories. Thus, I do well with various Bob Dylan, Monkees, and other pop tunes and TV theme songs. None of this is the least bit challenging for me to play.
It's true that listening to real jazz music "properly" takes concentration. But I've always found that jazz is pleasant, and easy to listen to when I'm at home just doing stuff around the house and not able to concentrate. So I often use KCSM much as other people use KOIT.
Well, I wouldn't say concentration, actually. I think that once a person is educated in jazz (or bluegrass, or Western swing, or chamber music, or symphonic, or any number of specialty genres) and knows what to listen for, it just jumps out at you, so you don't need to concentrate at all.
Jazz is big in tributes. A soloist is apt to play a riff that imitates John Coltrane, or Bix Beiderbecke or Louis Armstrong or whomever. When you're familiar with Coltrane or Bix or Armstrong, you smile and nod when you hear the tribute riff jump out at you.
Or when you know how a tune should go and the band or the soloist changes the beat or plays it slightly flat or using different chords. One example is the "Star Spangled Banner" as sung by a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Their rendition is designed to fit into one octave so that anyone can sing it, so some notes are lowered. The new rendition makes a lot of sense musically, but when most people hear it they laugh because they know how it's supposed to go. I've looked all over the Web to find it but apparently they've never released it. It's a hoot.
So, jazz and other specialized genres, I think, are more about getting a little education in the music and then it all makes sense. This is true of food, too. If a person learns about various spices they can then appreciate a dish when it's made with those spices.
I usually use the color pink as an example. Growing up I knew pink. Pink was a light red, a whitish red. Pink was pink, or so I thought. But then I was educated in the colors fuchsia, salmon, rose, and coral. Now that I know more about pink I can differentiate the shades. Until I know about pink I couldn't. Pink was pink.
