Just listen!

What a sad reflection on national identity it is that it was only after I had completed my self indulgent blog that I realised that I had done nothing to celebrate the Welsh National Day of Saint David's Day.

It was therefore with something approaching panic that I went to that every ready photographic repository, my garden. There, at least, were lurking the national flower.

You would think that flowers are particularly good subjects for photographs because, unlike birds and animals, they do not tend to move around very much. That of course is generally true, but in gusty wind, flowers can be quite frisky! However, I strapped them down and have produced a few pictures to salve my Cymric conscience!

What is it that makes jazz so irritating?

That opening sentence reminds me of the title of Richard Hamilton’s picture “Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?”

[You can find more information that you ever wanted to know about his collage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_What_Is_It_that_Makes_Today's_Homes_So_Different,_So_Appealing%3F]

And the picture sort of expresses my view of jazz too. I know that this is the iconic picture that uses ‘Pop’ (as on the lollypop) to reinforce the establishment of ‘Pop Art’ as a distinct genre, but I’m not really concerned about that. I’m much more interested in the unsettling effect that this work has had on me.

The image is engaging, but at the same time disconcerting. The clash of colour and black and white is dislocating and the collage technique shares that same sense of nearly professional: it lack the inhuman perfection of Mondrian, but doesn’t have the freedom of Rauschenberg, so it remains in an uneasy no-man’s-land of contrived spontaneity, and it’s that “contrived spontaneity” that I find so maddening in Jazz.

I know that my lack of appreciation of this musical form, and the way in which I am talking about it will be enough to convince any Jazz aficionado that I am a person of no note (ha!) and I know not of what I speak. I am using the term Jazz as if it defines a single style, whereas Jazz is as wide ranging a musical denomination as the loose term Classical. This I know. I also know that some Jazz performers are consummate musical professionals and great musicians – but they still irritate the hell out of me!

I writhe with impotent fury when Radio 3 includes Jazz as part of the morning programme as I feel it has no right to be juxtaposed with Mozart and Rachmaninov. Some friends who I’ve persuaded to listen to Radio 3 tell me that they listened with amazement to the (as they said) unbelievable, snobbish, arrogant exclusivity exuded from the lightly confiding presenters of music programmes. They felt as if they were eavesdropping on a select club to which they did not have membership. I feel the same when I hear Jazz; there’s something going on which I don’t really understand or appreciate, and I don’t like it!

Some might say that the key to my problem is contained in those words “understand and appreciate”; if I learned more, opened my mind and my ears, did a bit of homework then my increase knowledge and experience will, inevitably result in my increase understanding and appreciation: I’ll like it.

But I don’t want to spend any more time on Jazz. I don’t feel inclined to listen more. Life, as they say, is too short.

Returning from taking Toni to work, I listened, because it was on the radio, to a three or four instrument jazz combo playing an arrangement of The Beatles’ track ‘Blackbird.’ It was very professionally done, but I could feel my skin crawl as I listened.

I am used to variations on a theme from Mozart’s ‘Ah, vous direz-je Maman’ to Elgar’s ‘Enigma’, but they do not irritate me. I do question my own responses: is it the instrumentation; the loose sliding rhythms; the diffuse orchestration; the louche melodic line; the sheer self indulgence of it all? I don’t know.

But, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, I am willing to love all mankind, except a Jazzman."

And Rap. Obviously.

My loss, I know, but I am willing to live with it!

Bring on the Beethoven! (And not the ‘roll over’ kind.)