Jazz

I realized the limits of my music knowledge during a piano session with a Jazz mentor despite studying classical music for the last 20 years. If you were to compress his insight into a metaphorical 100 page cook book, this inaugural lesson started on page 70-something.

His name is Jim - a stout man with curly hair, hazel/green eyes and a faded New York accent that has since retired from a career in electrical engineering. With a degree in English, Physics and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, I could imagine his mind idling at 90 miles-per-hour during our conversation. His colorful sense of humor and honesty is something that makes up the character of Berkeley, CA and he lives with his wife Helen in what my dad calls The Treehouse just up the hill from the college football stadium.

I grew up discretely wishing for the rare moments when he play the piano during his Labor Day barbecue cookouts. It's almost as if he could smell desperation and wouldn't play some years, but 2017 was the first time that I finally had the courage to ask him to teach me the basics. I just finished a course in Jazz Theory analysis for my music degree and felt ready enough to sit down with him for once. However, you have to understand something: if classical musicians thinks in three dimensions, then a jazz musicians like Jim have discovered a fourth. 

I spent the majority of my life learning the rules, techniques, and precision to 'color' in the musical lines by invoking a composer's style from 300+ years ago. However, the complexity of what was shared in that one hour lesson (whether he cared to realize or not) was how to bend the rules at every corner and break them every chance he could.

I walked away from the lesson with more questions than answers and would spend the next three years deciphering a five chord progression that he had me scribble down on a flashcard. At the end of the lesson, I sheepishly asked the existential question: "So, what is Jazz?" and his answer went something like this after a heavy sigh: 

"Well, if you want to understand Jazz, you have to feel the Blues". 

I was unsatisfied with this cryptic answer at first, but now it almost always makes my well up with tears when saying this out loud. 

After many years of ruminating what he meant, I think of it as a sorrow so deep that it becomes beautiful - if you let it. A pain that you have to embrace in order for it hurt in a good way. I realize that sounds sadistic or heavy,  but it's one of those things that you have to nibble at and digest before you find yourself coming back for more. 

My latest dream is to start a group of physicians with a music background after reflecting on the woes of medicine after a string of challenging shifts in Emergency Medicine. In the meantime, it is a one-man-band called: Code Blues. One day I will have the courage to share a recording of my own, but for now you will have to settle for a small collection of pieces that I've squished together on spotify.

~mdc
March 3rd, '26