{"id":7193,"date":"2025-03-06T06:45:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T06:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jassmine.com\/article\/talkin-all-that-jazz-2\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T06:52:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T06:52:51","slug":"talkin-all-that-jazz","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/jassmine.com\/en\/article\/talkin-all-that-jazz\/","title":{"rendered":"Talkin\u2019 all that jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<aside id=\"quote-block_67e3a33b9dbd7\" class=\"quote font-sans-title fs-12 lh-1-12 fs-dt-20 lh-dt-1-4 ls-dt-0-4\">\n\n    <a class=\"quote__inner\" href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Y8g9KZYjAEk?si=1AJ2fyzLViwf6ziT\" target=\"_blank\">\n  \n      <p class=\"quote__content\">And I would like to play\u00a0a little tune I just composed not so long ago\u2026<\/p>\n  \n      <span class=\"quote__description\">Gang Starr \u201eJazz Thing\u201d<\/span>\n  \n    <\/a>\n  \n<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Talkin\u2019 all that jazz: a few words about rhythm, body and time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<div id=\"text-in-columns-block_67e3a33b9dc13\" class=\"text-in-columns fs-20 lh-1-4 ls-0-4\">\n\n  <p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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 Stanis\u0142aw 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\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<div id=\"text-in-columns-block_67e3a33b9dc6b\" class=\"text-in-columns fs-20 lh-1-4 ls-0-4\">\n\n  <p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.\u00a0 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 &#8211; according to many linguists and anthropologists &#8211; that gave rise to the word jazz <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8211; I wrote four years ago in the liner notes to the album \u201cKwiatostan\u201d by the group B\u0142oto, 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 &#8211; from \u201cPyzatych s\u0142onecznik\u00f3w\u201d (\u201cChubby Sunflowers\u201d) by the group NOVI, through \u201cGrey Flower\u201d by Sta\u0144ko, to &#8220;Kwiateczki\u201d (\u201cLittle Flowers\u201d) by Kuba Wi\u0119cek and Paulina Przybysz &#8211; 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 &#8211; simply my personal possession. In the era of modern eclecticism and the lack of any clear definition whatsoever of concepts, someone\u2019s 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 &#8211; felt, experienced, performed, applauded, listened to and danced collectively. That\u2019s how it was over one hundred years ago in New Orleans\u2019s Storyville and that\u2019s how it is today in South Central Warsaw.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<div id=\"text-in-columns-block_67e3a33b9dcb5\" class=\"text-in-columns fs-20 lh-1-4 ls-0-4\">\n\n  <p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8211; told me Tomasz Sta\u0144ko in 2011 during our first meeting &#8211; <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This groove is, simply put, incredibly powerful.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> African-American culture is strong and vital. After all it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<div id=\"text-in-columns-block_67e3a33b9dcf6\" class=\"text-in-columns fs-20 lh-1-4 ls-0-4\">\n\n  <p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The groove &#8211; an English word that is impossible to translate, in which rhythm, body and time join forces to start dancing &#8211; 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 &#8211; a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">machine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for stretching and compressing, thickening and thinning, decelerating and accelerating it.\u00a0 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\u2019s biography. One phrase is enough to bring back memories of our adolescence, one chord allows us to move back to years when we weren\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<div id=\"text-in-columns-block_67e3a33b9dd50\" class=\"text-in-columns fs-20 lh-1-4 ls-0-4\">\n\n  <p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After all jazz is not only swing, bop and fusion, cool, modal and free, spiritual, acid and smooth. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jazz is hip hop and hip hop is jazz <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8211; 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 \u2019n\u2019 bass, of which some of the most important cornerstones were club rollers by Ronie Size and DJ Krust bearing titles like \u201cIt\u2019s a Jazz Thing\u201d and \u201cJazz Note\u201d. Jazz is drum and bass, keyboard, string and wind instruments, it\u2019s voice used to sing, rhyme and vocalize, it\u2019s sampler, synthesizer and record player; it\u2019s everything. Because <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">jazz is not what you play but how you play it <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8211; as once said Lester Bowie, and I quoted these words in the aforementioned liner notes of \u201cKwiatostan\u201d 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: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and who you are; who actually plays.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">music is something universal: an emotion, love, a crazy thought that allows you (\u2026) to stand on stage and play yourself.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bend time, feel the groove in your body and play jazz. Or listen to it and feel it. Like a jasmine.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<aside id=\"quote-block_67e3a33b9dd7b\" class=\"quote font-sans-title fs-12 lh-1-12 fs-dt-20 lh-dt-1-4 ls-dt-0-4\">\n\n    <div class=\"quote__inner\">\n  \n      <p class=\"quote__content\">Now listen\u2026 <\/p>\n  \n      <span class=\"quote__description\">Gang Starr \u201eJazz Thing\u201d<\/span>\n  \n    <\/div>\n  \n<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<section id=\"apple-embed-block_67e3a33b9dd94\" class=\"apple-embed\">\n  <iframe allow=\"autoplay *; encrypted-media *;\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"150\" style=\"width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;\" sandbox=\"allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.music.apple.com\/pl\/album\/jazz-thing\/193653812?i=193655024&#038;l=pl\"><\/iframe><\/section>\n\n\n\n<div id=\"asset-block_67e3a33b9ddac\" class=\"asset-block\">\n\n  \n<figure\n  class=\"asset asset-block__asset\"\n  data-asset\n    >\n\n  \n<\/figure>\n\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6184,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"inline_featured_image":false},"class_list":["post-7193","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - 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