The Jazz Feeling

Jazz is really important music. I am amazed everyday as I listen to all kinds of music, non of it shows any influences of jazz. If you read Ken Burn's book, maybe it would make more sense. With the onset of hurricane Katrina, the very roots of our only native American art form are in question. Society needs to take this music more seriously, and we as a country need a resurgence of the jazz spirit. What am I talking about? Jazz music feels like no other music. It took tribal African drummers to be able to loosen up metronomic rhythmic feel. Once you learn that you can never go back. I have been playing cruise ships for about three years. Almost the entire time I have been confronted with all types of music, most of them not swinging. I guess it took Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, the Bebop School, to hip us up. They took traditional square ass, run-of-the-mill swing music, and made it really groove. That is what bebop is. The rhythmic feel of Bebop music swings on the off beat, not the on beat. 1&3 traditionally have been straight beats for upper crust Lester Lanin-type suits. Jazz loosens that rhythm up and makes it feel better and stronger. Accents in a bop melody swing on the off beats. Reggae swings on the off beat. Afro-Cuban swings on the off beat. Once you get that bubble in your soul, it is hard to go back. There has been no music in recent years that exhibits the desirable traits of jazz music. Our society is not swinging. Swing is almost real feeling personified. Unlike pop that glorifies a string of perfectly articulated eighth notes, bop adds soul to those melodies. The phrase or the sentence becomes more important than keeping perfect metronomic time. Why would anybody talk in a perfect rhythm with no accentuation? It is polite but boring. There are some interpretations of music from the Classic period that use this style. Jazz comes more from the Romantic period where phrases undulate.