paragraphing is for sissies, anal grammarians and me on nearly any other day
There was a small pile of band CDs by his left foot; I remember thinking about how they stayed perfectly stacked even though the foot beside it convulsed in hypnotic rhythm throughout the whole concert. Jazz isn't meant to be heard on a CD. It's only when the sax and piano are spilling over with their mahogany timbres, the rasp of the snare drums is glinting off the edge of your hearing, the double bass is pounding out the rich velvet bassline, and you're writhing in the middle of this riot of colour - that's jazz. There's something distinctively DIY about it, like a breathless ham-fisted patching-together of incongruous scrap fabrics. There's definitely something defiant about pounding out four bars of a G with a G#, while the sax executes ludicrous peregrinations circa the E-flat. But it's something altogether magical that holds the whole contraption together, makes it pulse with that same relentless rhythm, and somehow, inexplicably, makes a G, G# and E-flat make sense - effortlessly. I can't stop moving when I listen to jazz. The music usurps my motor functions completely. Also my thoughts. Sometimes when I listen to jazz, I find myself thinking about jigsaw pieces that tessellate across dimensions. For example, just this afternoon I thought about how it HAD to be dimensions that warped that double bass solo into something utterly unintelligible and arrhythmic, right up until that pristine moment when the drums and piano picked up the strands and the anarchic jazz universe collapsed into flawless 4/4 time and coherence. Effortlessly. It makes me euphoric. Jazz gives me a high like almost no other music, apart from most of it. But most of all, I like to imagine my euphoria trebled, quadrupled interdimensionally, to the levels the musicians must feel when up on stage, up in their seventh and ninth dimensional planes, pouring forth (effortlessly) these quixotic echoes of divinity.