Talkin’ all that jazz

One of the oldest genres of popular music, a language of sound expression that goes beyond all styles and maybe even beyond a musical lifestyle in time?!? Or maybe, like Stanisław Szukalski claimed, the first manifestation of true art since Gothic times? There are as many definitions of jazz as the years that have passed since in Storyville someone used this word for the first time. Every year we need new ones…

New Orleans dives of the early 20th century are said to have smelled of jasmine. Jasmine water, created in the distillation of flowers with water steam, was in fact the cheapest perfume, used by the queens of those nights to cover the smell of everyday toil, torment and sadness.  It was they who chased away their demons by dancing to the accompaniment of early piano syncopations, it was their tears, sweat, saliva and blood that penetrated the floorboards on which the first no-more-blues groups formed and it was their scent – according to many linguists and anthropologists – that gave rise to the word jazz – I wrote four years ago in the liner notes to the album “Kwiatostan” by the group Błoto, the first record recorded in the Warsaw club Jassmine and published in collaboration with this place. That club took its name from that flower and because of it, jasmine is associated nowadays in the capital with jazz. Although the history of Polish swing is full of different decorative plants – from “Pyzatych słoneczników” (“Chubby Sunflowers”) by the group NOVI, through “Grey Flower” by Stańko, to “Kwiateczki” (“Little Flowers”) by Kuba Więcek and Paulina Przybysz – it was actually this type of flower by the Vistula that became associated with music of the East, not the West. Going beyond this botanical etymology, we can however read Jassmine in this context as Jazz-mine, which allows for two other interpretations. Going down two floors below Wilcza street, regarding this place as a local jazz mine could be an inviting metaphor, yet I much prefer the second meaning of the English word mine – simply my personal possession. In the era of modern eclecticism and the lack of any clear definition whatsoever of concepts, someone’s own, separate and subjective categories of understanding of various names seems to be worth their weight in gold. And given that my view of jazz largely coincides with the way the owners of Jassmine look at it, I could easily write this text in the plural. Because I also perceive jazz as collective music – felt, experienced, performed, applauded, listened to and danced collectively. That’s how it was over one hundred years ago in New Orleans’s Storyville and that’s how it is today in South Central Warsaw.

Groove is a very beautiful word. It entered the musical dictionary at the dawn of the XX century; in the early days of Broadway; in the moment when black culture started to penetrate New York’s everyday life and leave its mark on the first performances and sketches. The type of clothes, humor and attitude that characterizes today American people all comes from slaves who, being around all the time, continuously influenced their masters. We can’t even realize the impact African-American culture has on our life. It changed the entire globe. In fact all dance, apart from tango and waltz, is based on groove, on this strange phenomenon that stems from the African culture of drummers. A phenomenon founded on a very precise way of playing rhythm and measuring time with movements of the body. The body is heavy and when it executes such a monotonous, steady movement, it works precisely like a pendulum clock – told me Tomasz Stańko in 2011 during our first meeting – This groove is, simply put, incredibly powerful. African-American culture is strong and vital. After all it’s similar in sports, where black athletes win a huge number of accolades. Life on Earth began in Africa and only later did some of us turn white. Art coming from the USA is however very expansive. Jazz in Poland still harks back to pre-war times because in the beginning it was restaurant music and jazz band played also in pubs along the Vistula river. After the war, in part also due to the communist prohibition, it was well received here. It seems to me that it’s not a matter of national nature but of the groove, which is strong, infectious and not at all hard to play. It only requires a certain type of intuitive knowledge, a different method of learning.

The groove – an English word that is impossible to translate, in which rhythm, body and time join forces to start dancing – is one of the keys to defining and understanding what jazz is. Especially today, after more than a hundred years of its existence and the dozens of stylistic changes this genre (more than others) has been through. Miles Davis once explained this idea as a time machine – a machine for stretching and compressing, thickening and thinning, decelerating and accelerating it.  Rhythm, or more broadly speaking all of music itself, indeed possesses this specific property, the ability to put the listener in a state where hours pass like minutes and minutes like hours, and to dissociate as strongly as many psychoactive substances. However, when we take into account what an important vehicle for memory and emotions music is, we can expand the aforementioned metaphor with time travels to practically every moment in our own or someone else’s biography. One phrase is enough to bring back memories of our adolescence, one chord allows us to move back to years when we weren’t yet alive, one note is capable of summoning the sadness, joy or anger that someone else once felt. Meanwhile, jazz is able to manage memory in a more interesting manner than most genres of popular music. It is realized not only in jazz standards played over and over for decades, but also in quotes heard in improvisation and samples that various beat makers have been cutting from these grooves for years. It is realized in the attention this trend pays to the past, in the focus placed on the present and the enthusiasm with which afrofuturists have always looked at the future.

After all jazz is not only swing, bop and fusion, cool, modal and free, spiritual, acid and smooth. Jazz is hip hop and hip hop is jazz – these are again the words of Miles Davis, and even though in the 1990s, at the height of the popularity of sampling jazz songs in rap, a similar claim was quite obvious, this relationship applies to virtually the entire history of rhymes and beats. Jazz is funk, soul and a considerable amount of Jamaican music genres derived from ska, the Caribbean syncopation inspired by recordings coming from New Orleans, to which all of Kingston danced in the 1950s. Jazz is progressive rock, math rock and post metal, whose drummers often also play in more conventional jazz groups, and the rhythms of one world are imperceptibly thrown into the other, and vice versa. Jazz is afrobeat, (deep) house and drum ’n’ bass, of which some of the most important cornerstones were club rollers by Ronie Size and DJ Krust bearing titles like “It’s a Jazz Thing” and “Jazz Note”. Jazz is drum and bass, keyboard, string and wind instruments, it’s voice used to sing, rhyme and vocalize, it’s sampler, synthesizer and record player; it’s everything. Because jazz is not what you play but how you play it – as once said Lester Bowie, and I quoted these words in the aforementioned liner notes of “Kwiatostan” and a series of other articles, reviews and interviews published in print or on the air. It was actually on the radio where Piotr Damasiewicz, who was once my guest, expanded that definition with one additional important element. To the words of the American trumpeter (and visionary) he simply added: and who you are; who actually plays.And here we return to the previously mentioned community, or maybe directly to being a human, which in jazz always resonated in a way that is totally non-verbal and simultaneously quite descriptive, devoid of words yet understandable, clear and tangible. Because, as Lester Bowie continued, music is something universal: an emotion, love, a crazy thought that allows you (…) to stand on stage and play yourself.Bend time, feel the groove in your body and play jazz. Or listen to it and feel it. Like a jasmine.