Why I Play Jazz

3 minute read

Jazz, as we tend to look at it, is a style, but I feel that jazz is not so much a style as a process of making music. It’s the process of making music—making one minute’s music in one minute’s time… in an absolute sense, jazz is more of a certain creative process of spontanaeity than a style.

– Bill Evans

Jazz is a means for creative expression. The Bill Evans quote above comes from an interview with Bill Evans, titled Universal Mind of Bill Evans (this is a worthwhile watch about Bill’s approach to jazz), and it shifted my view of jazz. To dissect what Bill is saying, “style” is composed of the certain musical artifacts which are commonly associated with jazz. This could mean ii-V-I progressions, swing, altered chords, or any of the numerous musical components that summed together make up the sound or “style” of jazz. Jazz is less defined by these musical artifacts and moreso a means of creating music on the spot.

There is a level of difference between creating music fastidiously over a long period of time and creating music on the spot. To highlight the difference, recall a song you really loved the first time you heard it. When you first heard—or if you’re a musician, practiced—the song, it would clearly evoke in you that ineffable feeling that good music makes people feel. Your brain is hearing it for the first time, so it is fully immersed in and enjoying the emotion that the music is bringing out of you. When you listen to that song more and more, that feeling gradually fades. If you’re a musician this should be a particularly familiar feeling, as practicing a piece for the 100th time is markedly different than practicing it for the 1st time. When you’re improvising, you’re creating new music while also hearing it for the first time. It creates an organic environment where the music you’re creating is an authentic reaction to the music you played before it. You become an “active listener,” and listening to and creating music go hand in hand. When an improvisational idea really takes hold, you begin to start hearing two things: what you’ve currently played and what musical idea you want to play to follow it.

Studying jazz is a way to open your ear to hear what you want to play and be able to play it. This is achieved through training the ear and creating systems and practicing them so that you can effortlessly produce through your instrument the sound which you want to play.

Jazz is dissecting music into its essential parts so that you’ll be able to play over some chord changes and a melody on the fly. Not everything will sound good, but that’s okay. It’s a more low commitment way of creating music. It’s fun letting my intuition lead the way, seeing where it goes, and not worrying about writing anything down. Jazz is a different process of making music than carefully composing a song over a long period of time.

The last reason why I play jazz is its inherent creative freedom: there is no right or wrong. In classical music, you have to play the right notes and play the right dynamics. In jazz, there is no right or wrong, but everyone has something valid and unique to say because improvisation is a form of creative self-expression. If you say something in your improvisation, it’s out there and you can’t take it back. Instead of worrying about what I have played already, I usually am just thinking about what I’m going to play next.

Written on May 27th, 2020 by Chris Cheung