JAZZ IS MY RELIGION

            I think I can honestly say that learning to play jazz piano saved my life.  In my deepest depressions, Jazz gave me something bigger than myself to hold onto. One of the positive things I think religion gives some people is a feeling of humble gratitude that helps them keep going when everything else in life turns to shit. This is how I feel about Jazz after many years of being more to less deeply involved in studying it and playing it. But I suppose the way in which jazz is most like a religion for me is in the certainty and sense of purpose it gives. I am certain that it is a good thing to learn another Ellington or Monk composition, as I imagine some Christians seem certain about praying or reading the Bible. When in doubt about what to do, I know that studying jazz and practicing to play it are things worth doing.

    While one could claim that deity-oriented religions are obviously doing a lot better than Jazz at surviving, it seems obvious to me that all music can make a greater contribution to human survival and well-being than the accumulative effect of most religions, which survive partly through psychic intimidation, such as the threat of eternal damnation. This brings me to a major difference between religion and devotion to Jazz. While religious dogma is often harmful to both believers and persecuted non-believers, Jazz dogma is only harmful to jazz musicians. The music can’t hurt you, but struggling to play it can. If you don’t know the blues when you start, you know them soon enough.

    While it has brought great joy into my life, Jazz also asks for sacrifice. Like being a monk or a missionary, being a jazz musician is not very lucrative, and even those musicians who make a living at it spent many years not making a living at it. Even very good jazz musicians become so frustrated that they “lose faith” get day jobs and at least temporarily become bitter about the struggle. But jazz has always drawn me back, much to the dismay of certain people who thought my career as a writer or scholar was sacrificed to almighty Jazz.

     Now for some testifying. In 1976 I was 19 and going through my “beat” period, writing poetry, reading William S. Burroughs and Kerouac novels, hanging out with jazz musicians and trying to learn to play piano.  Sensing that I needed a journey of some kind on which to contemplate my future, I took a Greyhound bus across the country. Looking back on it now I realize the idea and the energy to do such a thing coincided with a hypomanic episode I didn’t know I was having.  It was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Walden Pond but it included my first trip to New York City and Boston.            

    One of my most vivid memories from that journey took place somewhere in the Harvard/Cambridge area on a Sunday afternoon.  I must have come down hard from the hypomania and was falling into another un-comprehended depression. I was down and almost broke abut still social enough to feel lonely so I went to a place where a local jazz group was playing.  As soon as I heard them joyously launch into Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone” I was lifted up, out of my loneliness, out of my anxiety and depression. They were not overtly technical musicians, but they meant what they played, and they were swinging mightily. The 50-something black man playing tenor saxophone winked at my 19 year old white suburban self as if he knew that I knew what he had been “talking about” in his solo. Musicians can always spot other musicians in the audience. They listen closer when you play the good stuff.

    Sitting there in historic Boston, in our bicentennial year, contemplating how the music I most loved had the stain of slavery on it, I had an epiphany. Jazz came from the very people America enslaved. The least I could do was learn how to play this music, this gift freely given by the most wronged Americans. This was not a conversion experience. I had already been converted to Jazz and was still in that sophomoric phase of jazz snobbery in which I actively made fun of pop music. But that Sunday at the jam session when I was far from home,  I was developing a kind of faith, a faith that learning to play Jazz was worth living for. It didn’t matter if I became famous or at the top of the field or successful financially at it, I just wanted to get good enough someday to sit in with those guys in that bar in Boston. I was in church that Sunday, not because a great jazz musician was playing, but precisely because it was just an afternoon jam session of local players. 

     In all the jazz writing I have read, both criticism and history, there is little mention of the fact that the majority of jazz activity that goes on is not professional. Though we can only put rough numbers to this local jazz scene, we can be sure that in bulk it vastly outweighs the big-time arena in any terms: number of players, number of gigs played, and even number of audience members if we count school programs and the total number of local fans attending across the country. Ultimately, jazz is alive because of this local scene and not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This is my church, and it is a much more diverse community than most congregations.

From the musicians I met early on in my own local jazz community I somehow got the idea that not only should a player strive for technique and knowledge, but to develop a voice, to play “like yourself,” which really means that improvising within this paradoxical “tradition of innovation” is a way of finding yourself. Playing like yourself means being musically honest, a transcendent Mecca that you face toward every time you play.  In this sense, it is like prayer. It becomes like meditation when you are free of intruding thoughts and are playing and listening to everyone else’s playing in present time. Those “being in the flow” moments don’t happen that often to most players. It is a kind of ecstatic state that you want to return to, and you can’t find it by playing the same thing you played when you experienced it before. Most musicians will tell you that after a good improvisation they don’t really remember what they played. It is not what they played that leads back to that transcendent state; the only way back is forward, trying to have ideas and be musical in present time with as little conscious deliberation as one has when carrying on a conversation with a close friend, or testifying in your own church.

I am not sure that my appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement, a release of good neurotransmitters and invaluable friendships. In giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as an undiagnosed Bipolar II person. As such, jazz saved my life. Broke and lonely at the end of a hypomanic trip across the country with almost no sleep for days, I might have fallen into an abyss of depression that I could not crawl out of. Instead, I had something larger than myself to live for, and while my faith in Jazz has wavered over the decades since, I have never forgotten where my church is and I have always returned.

And I got better than “good enough” to play with those guys in that bar in Boston on a Sunday afternoon in 1976. I even play like myself at times.