Tom Stoppard and the "I Don't Understand Jazz" Myth
April 18 2010

You teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing, you end up with a lot of people saying "You write well."- from Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing

"You play jazz? I don't really know much about jazz. I wish I did." - says, it seems, everyone the Pianobabbler tells what he does.

Why?

The Pianobabbler sits in a doctor's office as he writes this. Early morning. Bleary. Benumbed. Bedraggled. Oh what a beautiful morning. A wash of saxo-phony anony-music washes through waiting room ears like a marzipan flush. Through and through. Dio mio, this is music?

Everyone knows they know what good music is. Paraphrasing what Descartes said about common sense: Of all things, music sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

Why, then, why do so many people say they don't understand jazz? What sound barrier interposes itself between their neo-Cartesian music sense and the music?

And why does so much of the caca-phony churning in the doctor's office this morning circulate as music, when its creators conceive it as anti-music?

Music engages and moves. It a-muses. It enchants (from Latin to sing.) The anti-music this morning disengages the listener with lullabye dullness.

I think Stoppard gives us insight into these mysteries. (The Pianobabbler has proclaimed his dotage for Stoppard's genius before. He will do so again.Tom Stoppard: the third 'S' of English-language theatre.)

The line at the top from The Real Thing, stuffs in plenty of meaning. A general sense has come to prevail that knowledge precedes judgment when it comes to art, be it writing or music. I can't know if this book or recording is good, until I learn if it is good.

No.

You can know this recording unaided. Learning is a sufficient, but not necessary condition of art.

We judge, we discern, we grasp, we appreciate, we feel. Music activates all these processes. They exist in us, normally. Reflexes. We react. Re-act.

No doubt, learning can enrich our aesthetic processes. Enhance them. Expand them. But it does not enable them.

You don't need to know anything to react to the Pianobabbler's music. It suffices to know that you are reacting.

By all means, acquire knowledge. Accept teaching. A Bach fugue becomes even more sublime when you know the mechanics of a fugue. Billie Holiday's rendering of Strange Fruit strikes even more deeply if you know the horrid history of Black American persecution. But both also stand steadily on their own.

Conversely, you can study Lady Gaga until she's Late n'Gone-gone, Pokerface will remain a p-p-p-lain p-p-pop song.

The Pianobabbler, needless to say, has not an anti-learning bone in his body. On the contrary. He is a confirmed learnaholic. Learn, by all means learn, about music.

Above all, though, trust your ears. Trust your instincts. Let the music in. Do not shut it out, a priori, on theoretical principle.

It's not the learning that will lead you to the music. It's the openness.

As first 'S' of dramaturgy put it: The readiness is all.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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