All That Jazz

                 I’ve been listening to some jazz albums. I don’t know what made me try them, except a vague wish to try something different, and a vague wish to find out What It’s All About. I was raised on three minute pop songs, and I’ve always thought of jazz as either a lot of musicians trying to impose their tunes on each other, or else as the sort of easy listening that your parents would like. But I put Jazz For Beginners as a search term in Google, got a list of suggestions from various websites, and ordered half a dozen of them from my local library.

                The one which has really captured my imagination is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Seven instrumental tracks featuring sinuous saxophone solos and soaring piano breaks. The track Take Five sounds familiar, perhaps from a car advert. I’d always thought that the instrument was a clarinet rather than saxophone, so clearly I’ve got cloth ears. This is smooth and melodic, but it isn’t bland. Oh, and the opening track, Blue Rondo A La Turk, is nothing to do with that group from the 1980s.

                Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock also blew me away. Four instrumentals which seem to belong to the Funk genre as much as anything else, but I guess you can’t fully compartmentalize art. Ladies, these tracks have tunes, you can dance to them. I remembered Herbie Hancock from that hip-hop/scratch instrumental Rockit in the 1980s, so I was surprised to find that he’s been a legendary jazz stalwart as well. You learn something every day.

                                                                *

                At my writing class the other day, the course tutor put us into pairs for an exercise. We had to make up a story between us. My mind went blank. I absolutely could not contribute anything, and the poor woman who’d been saddled with me had to do all the work.

                I can’t, any more, seem to make up stories as I go along. I need to think some way along. And I’ve realized since, too, that I need to know the characters. Which is why, for my next project, I am determined not to write a word of it until I’ve written at least a biography of my protagonist.

                Although I’ve said that before…