For several months I have been reluctantly following the “Five Minutes That Will Make You Love …” articles in The New York Times. Each of these involves either a jazz genre or an individual performer. My initial reaction was to recall my high school English teacher, who prepared us for the College Boards using the book 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Norman Lewis. However, while that book did prepare me for those exams, it also stimulated me to cultivate a vocabulary that would provide the foundation for just about all of my subsequent writing tasks, going all the way up to the present day.
In contrast to the utility of vocabulary, the Times jazz series strikes me as pathetically counterproductive (a word I added to my vocabulary with great relish). Most important is that, where just about any act of making music is concerned, nothing establishes any significant impact over the course of five minutes. At best, that duration encourages the attentive listener to continue listening. At worst, the listener dismisses the experience as total garbage; and, more often than not, that assessment turns out to be both inaccurate and unfair.
Cover of the album of the two “editions” of “Ascension” (from the Amazon.com Web page)
The latest Times article in this series appeared online this morning, and the topic was “avant-garde jazz.” My own first encounter with this genre took place when the John Coltrane album Ascension arrived at the campus radio station. I was there the first time it was aired; and it would be fair to say that I was absolutely riveted for the roughly 40 minutes of the duration (which included the few seconds required to flip the disc, since the release predated CD technology). It did not take me long to purchase my own copy of the album, using the liner notes to guide me through each of the solos taken by Coltrane and the other seven performers. Once I had succeeded in “parsing” the overall performance, I could then home in on not only the solos but also the wildly churning transition passages.
As some (many?) readers might guess, none of the “Five Minutes” contributors offered a Coltrane selection. This did not surprise me, since I doubt that there are any Coltrane tracks with such a short duration. Mind you, Marcus J. Moore, who compiled the Times article, cited Coltrane as the “biggest public advocate” of “free jazz,” which he described as “a subset of avant-garde jazz,” in his introduction to the overall list. This should be sufficient to discourage the reader from thinking about “avant-garde jazz” as a category in the first place. Such a practice would be as much of a blunder as the decision to lump the better part of nineteenth-century music under the “romantic” category.
I suppose that the fallacy behind these Times articles is that one does not love categories. We remember specific experiences, and those memories tend to be most vivid when they entail some shift in our thinking. For example, my generation probably knew Coltrane best for the way he could turn Mary Martin’s saccharine account of “My Favorite Things” into a cheerfully bopping listening experience. When the Ascension album was released, we all knew that Coltrane was going somewhere “completely different” (in Monty-Python-speak).
Those of us that take listening seriously usually have no problem with accepting the precept that things change. Indeed, it is because things change that each new encounter requires respect afforded by serious listening. This is as true of my encounters with recordings (old, as well as new) as it is of my experiences in Davies Symphony Hall. Thus, every one of the mini-essays that one encounters in one of the Times’ “Five Minutes” articles basically evaporates in memory as one moves on to new listening experiences. “Love” can be very fluid, and following its flow is almost always more important than declaring its instance!
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