My personal experience in listening to jazz has been particularly scatterbrained. I owned very few actual jazz albums before going to college. It sort of makes me wonder how I decided to major in something I knew so little about in comparison with my peers.

Once I got to UNT, I was suddenly surrounded with people who had been listening to this music all their lives, with influences and suggestions from well-listened teachers. There were kids my age who had truly intricate knowledge of many important jazz albums. A lot of the most famous players in jazz were little more than names to me. Some particularly poor scores on Jay Saunders’s Intro to Jazz Records tests made it abundantly clear that I needed to do a HELL OF A LOT MORE LISTENING to jazz if I really wanted to understand and play it well. Since then, my knowledge and understanding has grown a lot, but still, as I said earlier, scatterbrained. In the same way that a puzzle is not completed from the top left to the bottom right, the gaps in my knowledge get filled in a seeminly random fashion. I’ve written about this before.

Today, Ethan Iverson, the pianist for The Bad Plus dropped a motherlode of blog posts on various topics in jazz. My understanding of these topics ranges from paltry to moderate. It’s obvious from his writing that the dude has listened to more than a few metric assloads of jazz in his time. I’ve given a couple of these articles a skimming and will continue to dive into them and listen to the albums and players he’s referenced. I’ll do this especially in the Marsalis/Young Lions-centered pieces. I probably have fewer jazz records from the 1980s than any other decade.

Iverson is only 11 years older than me, but he has been in New York for about 15 years, which means he’s experienced a lot of the major changes in the scene firsthand. To me and people my age, it’s all history. It’s very distant. If I want to know about Wynton Marsalis’s influence in New York, I have to read or hear about it. I didn’t live it. It’s the same thing with when even relatively newer groups/artists like the Bad Plus, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Joshua Redman. By the time I was aware of these people, they had already made their splashes and had grown from their initial albums.

This sort of sounds like complaining, I guess, but I’m OK with my situation. I’ll bet a lot of people my age have a similar experience. I’ll continue filling in gaps, however haphazardly. The way I write and play music is constantly being influenced by things I hear from all different periods. Quincy Jones’s old Basie charts show me things I want to learn and incorporate as much as Maria Schneider’s, Darcy James Argue’s and VOID’s (Tom O’Halloran and Troy Roberts).

I’m planning on seeing Iverson wih the rest of the Bad Plus at the Dakota around Christmas time. They always have a run of shows there this time of year. I went last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ll also be able to catch Happy Apple during my time back home. It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen them. They have seemed to always have a show the weekend before I get back to Minnesota for a break from school.

I sure have lots of thoughts in my head.

This is a video of the Australian Jazz/Funk band VOID performing their tune “London” at the 2006 IAJE Conference in New York. I might be somewhere in the back of this video, as I wandered into the hotel during their set. It’s hard to tell. They write and play great tunes, which have inspired me to write some of my own.