'Jazz' (a confession...)

I’ve got a confession to make.

I think I’m beginning to like ‘jazz.’

Hear me out.

There are a couple of ‘jazz’ musicians hiding amongst Restless Dream regulars.

Josh, on bass, Alan on drums, and Danny Wellens on piano have all been known to ‘jazz.’

Alan is currently on tour in Japan with Manchester ‘jazz’ artist Matthew Halsall, and Josh and Danny are fully-fledged composers and bandleaders in their own right.

So last night, a quiet, unassuming Tuesday, I headed to the Carlton Club in Chorlton to watch Josh’s ‘jazz’ band—The Joshua Cavanagh-Brierley Sextet.

Josh is comfortably one of the weirdest men I’ve ever met, so I was intrigued by the prospect of music written by him being played by some of Manchester’s other strangest humans.

And I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

I think the experience reminded me of a few things it’s easy to forget.

Firstly, it reminded me why I love musicians.

And I think ‘jazz’ musicians are probably the most musician-y of musicians.

Now, I’m not patting myself on the back here because, truthfully, I don’t consider myself a ‘musician.’

I can grab a few chords on a guitar and hold a tune; that’s where my technical skills begin and end.

Great ‘jazz’ musicians, on the other hand, have achieved such mastery on their instruments that they can return full circle to the sounds a completely incompetent beginner might make—squealing saxophone notes, discordant piano chords—all in the name of art.

They epitomize the idea, often attributed to Pablo Picasso, that you should ‘learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.’

This is partly what I love about them.

They also refuse to consider anything other than what artistically moves them in the moment, no matter how weird the results.

There’s something that kills me (in the best possible way) about the most gifted people in a medium deciding to make things as challenging as possible for an audience that they could otherwise seduce and pleasure at will.

When I write a song, I’d really, honestly, like a large audience to like it; to relate to it, even.

Sure, it has to feel authentic to me, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aiming for that special place where what I like and what other people like meet up and kiss.

Not so with ‘jazz’ music.

And that isn’t to say the audience doesn’t like it—people who love ‘jazz’ absolutely love ‘jazz.’

But their enjoyment certainly feels like a secondary-order effect; a consequence running parallel to the act itself.

You occasionally find this attitude in other art forms too—in writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Faulkner, or directors like Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch.

Josh’s sextet—Josh on an utterly relentless upright bass, helped by a drummer and a pianist to underpin three horns (trombone, trumpet, and tenor sax)—play music that even I, as someone who plays music for a living, struggle to follow.

I generally have a decent grasp of composition—I can spot and trace a motif, I can pick out sections as they arise, I can hear when the key modulates or the time signature changes, and I understand when the usual rules of pop songwriting are bent by an unusual borrowed chord or an ambitious harmony.

But watching Josh’s band, I felt like I was hearing a conversation in five different languages at once.

At one side of the stage, Josh and his drummer were locked into a series of endlessly complex pushes and pulls (despite the drummer telling me, moments before going on, that he couldn’t really remember the arrangements).

On the opposing flank, the pianist, a gentle, softly spoken man from London with an earring, punctuated them with odd geometric chords that sounded both virtuosic and infantile.

Between the two, the horn section were blaring and rasping in turns, gloriously rising and falling with whatever felt like ‘the tune,’ bringing some semblance of melodic meaning to the perfectly disciplined mayhem happening on either side.

If you're a foreigner to the world of jazz, like me, let me me give you the basics.

Jazz, as far as I can tell, generally works like this: there’s a ‘head’—a predetermined refrain, or chorus, if you like, that the piece returns to several times and also begins and ends with.

In between these sections, various players in the band are given free rein to improvise (within the thematic context of the piece).

When their improv ends, they signal silently with their eyes, and the bandleader returns everybody to the head.

The thing is, even these safe 'head' sections in Josh’s compositions are mind-bendingly complex.

They shift in and out of time signatures, blending scales and modes together in ways you’d never expect—it’s music, but not as you know it.

It’s hypnotic, raucous, and bizarre.

It was a phenomenal gig—I’d go again every night.

It also reminded me of the the other thing I love about jazz musicians: the contrast between their wild on-stage genius and their mundane off-stage lives.

It isn’t that their lives are especially mundane—they live the same lives as everybody else.

It’s just that the juxtaposition heightens things to such a comic degree.

One minute they’ll be telling you about the problems they’ve been having with a roofer or their car insurance.

The next, they’ll be channeling some sort of ancient, intergalactic magic through a trombone, making it scream and cry like a tortured ghost.

Then, afterwards, they’ll wipe their glasses and resume chatting to you about their allotment as though nothing had happened.

But I think even more than the music, even more than the musicians, I love that ‘jazz’ exists.

I love the way we, as a species, can be so flamboyantly decadent as to have reserved the right for a subsection of our population to spend their lives making it.

It’s the ultimate abstraction, the ultimate anti-utilitarian statement, the ultimate, most glorious waste of everybody’s time.

And this impulse is one of the things that continually restores my faith in humanity.

We aren’t merely happy with survival and reproduction.

We constantly need to re-explore, re-fathom, and redefine the boundaries of everything we come across.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent comes across the planning committee in charge of populating the new planet Earth, he discovers a secret.

The committee is sending two ships.

Ship one is full of engineers, labourers, teachers, doctors, and farmers.

Ship two is reserved for management consultants, marketing executives, and telephone sanitizers.

I’d like to think that, if Douglas Adams was writing in 2024, there’d be a few more job descriptions added to that second list.

The secret, of course, is that the second ship isn’t heading for Earth at all.

It’s being fired out into the vast, empty depths of space.

The joke, of course, is that there are probably some industries we could all live without.

I like to think jazz musicians belong on a third ship.

A third ship, crewed by a strange collection of misfits, bound together by a secret honour code that gathers them together in dark rooms to transcend normality.

A crew that speaks in a furtive code of numbers and fleeting eye contact, that makes music designed to test the fabric of time and space.

That believes rules are there to be mastered so they can be broken, that money has no place in determining good art, and that the audience should always be simultaneously respected and ignored.

That does that most life-affirming of things—reminds us that there’s more to life than life.

Keep dreaming,

Rob

p.s. Please do go and check out Josh's stuff - his last album 'Joy in Bewilderment' is available to stream everywhere you'd expect, and available to purchase on vinyl or via bandcamp. Just type Joshua Cavanagh-Brierley into search-bars everywhere.