all that jazz

For one reason or another, one data point that some people have determined is valuable in determining whether someone else is intelligent or has artistic taste is what that person's opinion of Jazz music is.  If you can appreciate Jazz it somehow establishes that your brain works in ways that are superior to normal brains in certain functions.  Perhaps this is true, but if that is the case I cannot count myself among those superior thinkers.  I simply do not like Jazz music.

The reasons for my disinterest in Jazz are numerous and detailed below.

Jazz is played in 7th chords.  I do not generally like 7th chords.  An example of what I am talking about is below.



Jazz focuses on improvisation.  This shows up both in the instrumentals and in "scat," which most people know is the "boop-diddy-bebop" that some singers throw into the improvisational sections of songs.  All of this improvisation sounds random, as it is supposed to.  I think this randomness and unpredictability is appealing to a lot of people, but it does not do anything for me.

One of the main instruments utilized in Jazz is the saxophone, and for reasons that I cannot currently articulate, this is one of my least favorite instruments.  I think I have a weird mental association with the instrument because I largely find saxophone music to either be depressing or boring.

Finally, and probably more importantly, Jazz is different from most other forms of music in that there is little or no focus on resolution.  Most music follows a pattern of question and answer.  Two or more musical phrases will be put together where the first phrase or group of phrases builds tension, like a question in verbal communication, and the final phrase will resolve the tension by concluding on a note or chord that answers the previous question.  So, where most music sounds to my mind like a question and response, Jazz sounds to me like a run-on sentence that, even for its length, never completes its thought.

I am sure that a lot of my distaste has to do with the fact that I have not put enough effort into understanding Jazz to appreciate it.  I do think that I have some valid perspectives for an art form that is intended to be subjective anyway, though.  Sometimes people are just not wired to be able to enjoy specific things.