And All That Jazz — Part 1: The Boy With the Melodic Minor Scale in His Head
A unique combination and sequence of notes and chords form the magical language of jazz improvisation, enabling those fluent in it to engage in musical conversations that transform their lives.
Jazz was always a mystery to me. I came of age in the time of Elvis and the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Then came the Beatles and the British Invasion, along with Motown and The Beach Boys, and next the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors. Once the buds of the Laurel Canyon creative community started blooming — Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Byrds, and Jackson Browne — I was hooked for good, and that genre of music has held me in thrall ever since.
Once, while living in Switzerland, a jazz-loving friend took me to see Dave Brubeck play. I enjoyed his style of “cool jazz” and its soothing blend of melodic, classically inspired compositions seasoned with unique rhythms. But this one show was but a blip on my overall musical radar screen.
Ironically, the experience that most turned me on to jazz was watching the Amazon Prime police procedural “Bosch,” starring Titus Welliver in the title role. A hard-boiled, big-city homicide detective, Bosch would come home after each hard day of hunting killers, take his dog Coltrane for a walk, and then gently place the needle of his high-end turntable onto a vinyl jazz record. Then he’d pensively sip a single malt while watching the sunset over LA from his hilltop apartment. The names of the various artists and songs he played would appear on my iPad screen when I tapped it, and I’d jot down all the albums and download them on my iPhone music library. Before long, my collection included Miles Davis, Ron Carter, John Coltrane, Frank Morgan, Art Pepper, Coleman Hawkins, and others.
Jazz Comes to Town
So when a very nice woman named Monique at the tennis club where my wife and I play invited us to see her Juilliard-trained jazz pianist son perform with his group at a place called the Kitano around the corner from our apartment in New York, we jumped at the chance. And that closed the deal. My wife and I were blown away.
Yet jazz remains a mystery — especially the avant garde kind that had always struck me as inaccessible, lacking the addictive sweet ear candy common to catchy pop tunes and tending to go off on long, cacophonous tangents.
But I’ve sensed something about my musical sensibilities changing recently. A turning point occurred when my wife took me for my birthday to see the jazz bassist Christian McBride play at Dizzy’s Club in Jazz at Lincoln Center. As I recall, on that night McBride was accompanied by a trumpeter and a drummer. And though they did go off in a lot of circuitous directions, instead of being put off I became entranced — as I used to with Robby Krieger’s guitar solos for the Doors back in the psychedelic mid-1960s to ’70s. And, just like the free-form, trance-inducing guitar, keyboard and drum solos of those days, the adventurous side-trips McBride and his bandmates went off on always returned to the core element of whatever song they were playing. The audience — with me now a fully engaged member — would be whisked back to the present, where we expressed our gratitude for the ride with a whooping ovation.
An Expanding Musical Palate
I didn’t yet understand this kind of music, but I was beginning to acquire a taste for it. So when my wife and I saw Monique’s son Ben Rosenblum and his band playing a softer but definitely related brand of jazz at the club around the corner, my taste deepened — as if my musical palate were maturing.
After that first time, I saw Ben perform twice more at another local venue, Chelsea Table and Stage, accompanying a fabulous young French woman named Laura Anglade who sang jazz standards and scat. Ben’s piano playing was smooth and nimble, his fingers balletically dancing across the keys in seemingly spontaneous, effortless, sophisticated melodic runs that were both beautiful in themselves, but even more impactful in the way they complicated Laura’s lovely voice. To my great surprise, he also played accordion, instantly creating an auditory ambience that felt like a languid street in Paris.
Still a jazz novice, I lack the vocabulary to describe the music with precision. I approached Ben after the performance and asked if he’d sit down with me sometime and try to teach me something about the language of jazz. He graciously said he would.
When I arrived at the little coffee shop in my neighborhood where we’d agreed to meet, Ben was already there with his Japanese wife, Yoko. I’d seen her a few times before, both at Ben’s shows, and once food shopping at Eataly in the Flatiron district. At his shows, Yoko was always seated in the front row with friends. When I’d seen them away from Ben’s performance venues, the two were invariably holding hands, his right arm seemingly attached to her left, like conjoined twins. Their deep love and devotion to one another was a signature characteristic that struck me each time.
When I arrived at our meeting place, they were already there, sharing a cold drink and a pastry. The first thing we began talking about was how they met. Yoko took the lead.
“My brother knew of Ben’s music and thought I’d like it,” she said. “So for my birthday he gifted me tickets to a performance of Ben’s in Yokohama. I was so moved!”
Afterward, Yoko said, she contacted Ben on Instagram. “I told him how much I loved his music and sent him some of my visual arts.” Yoko creates soothing pastel images that are as tranquil as some of Ben’s music. For a while they’d have online sessions where Ben would make up music as Yoko created artwork that flowed from his melodies.
“The next year he played in Tokyo and we met for the first time in person,” she recalled. She paid him a return visit to New York, and before long they advanced to a very-long-distance relationship that sealed their bond. “A year-and-a-half ago, I came to New York and moved in with Ben in Harlem,” she said, as Ben looked on with a blissful smile, as if he were reliving the whole beautiful fairytale, word by word.
The Language of Jazz
Then we transitioned from the language of love to the language of jazz. And once Ben got started, it seemed he could go on forever. I got the impression that whether playing it or talking about it , he entered into a groove that injected him with pure energy.
“Jazz can be mysterious and weird to the untrained ear,” he told me. “The way I explain it is, jazz is like a conversation. The language of jazz has a historical foundation, a specific music theory, chords with specific types of characteristics and qualities, etc.”
From my own rudimentary research, I’d learned that among the things that make the jazz sound unique are specific scales that deviate from the standard Do, Re, Me, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do. The melodic minor scale, also known as the jazz melodic minor scale, is one of them. Having done a stint as a singer/songwriter of folk-pop music in my youth, I have a basic knowledge of what standard scales and chord progressions are, and can sort of understand that certain adjustments in the notes involved are a part of what give jazz its distinctive sound.
The point is, as I began to understand Ben’s explanation, musician’s trained in this genre can use these fundamental rules like we use words to compose sentences and have conversations.
“Jazz is like a conversation,” Ben explained. “Just like the conversation we’re having now, we didn’t plan it in detail. I had a broad idea of what we’d discuss. But I listen to what you say and I spontaneously form a response that’s authentic. You listen to what I say and then respond back. We both understand the subject or theme we’re conversing about and we keep coming back to it as a home base.”
Thus, “the more versed we are in the language,” in Ben’s view, the deeper and more interesting our conversation can be.
It made me think of something I heard Max Weinberg, drummer for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, say about the late, great drummer Charley Watts on the excellent streaming series “My Life as a Rolling Stone.” Weinberg was explaining how although the Stones are known for being a band that based their rock music on blues, Charlie Watts was a lifelong jazz lover who modeled his playing on the great jazz percussionists.
“”Well when you’re talking about the song “Rocks Off,” which is one of my personal favorites, if you listen to the fills, they’re in odd places,” Weinstein notes. “”So what he’s responding to, he’s in the moment having a musical conversation. That’s jazz. That’s jazz, because it’s so spontaneous.”
Spontaneous Creation
The spontaneity, the constant changeability through improvisation and creativity, Ben added, is what makes jazz musicians tirelessly passionate and never bored. “For a musician like me,” he said, “you get into flow by creating spontaneously.”
Talking about his performances with singer Laura Anglade, he said, “even if we’re playing songs we’ve played many times before, it’s different every time. We make different decisions every night: song order, song tempo, who leads, how we’re going to approach the intro, where we’re going to freely improvise,” and on and on.
And whether he’s performing for 10 or 20 people in a little dinner club, or many thousands at a music festival, Ben told me he’s equally gratified. “I hope to be doing this for the next 50 years,” the 30-year-old told me. “I just want to keep improving as a musician, as a pianist, as an accordionist and as a composer,” he said.
Jazz has given him a profession that earns him a comfortable living, it’s introduced him to his soulmate wife, and taken him all over the world a couple of times over.
In a word, jazz is his life. And he wouldn’t want it any other way.
Takeaways
1. Jazz is an acquired taste. Some just acquire it earlier and easier than others.
2. Jazz has a language of its own, just like the blues and rock. Unless you’re a jazz musician, it’s hard to explain but easy to recognize.
3. True jazz artists who treasure the genre and love to play — for intimate venues holding a handful of people or stadiums holding tens of thousands — feel they’ve hit the existential jackpot.
4. Jazz musicians can be some of the nicest and finest humans in the world.
If you’re interested in learning more about jazz, its history, and some of its most famous musicians, check out the following:
— “Let’s Get Lost,” Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary about the life of jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker.
— “The Birth of the Cool,” an amazing documentary of Miles Davis.
— Trailer for the 1988 movie Bird, Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic about jazz saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, starring Forest Whitaker.
— “The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz,” published by the Library of Congress.
