FREE JAZZ THINKING

I’ve realised that I don’t like an unclosed bracket.

It feels like an unfinished cup of tea or an oven left on, or perhaps a door that wasn’t locked. It all needs closure, or I can’t sleep.

The trouble is that a lot of people seem to think in tangents these days. Halfway through a thought they’ll think of something else, then leap again, and perhaps again. So, is that three or four unfinished thoughts? I don’t really know how to explain the way those loose threads get under my skin. My brain (which I’m about to compare to an Excel spreadsheet) flashes up with #N/A or #ERROR! or some such alarming thing. What I want is to unpick the conversation, go back and debug the code until I can resolve it!

But… people don’t always like that. They like to be free to hop from stone to stone, improvising their freestyle jazz thinking as they go, without someone annoying who really needs them to retrace their steps. They see those steps as workings out, scratchings on envelopes that are fragments of ideas towards a great and more important end, or perhaps many ends.

But jazz is not ‘making it up as you go along’. Not really. You need skill and understanding, feel and expression. And the joy of it is the journey - the emergence of sound, the dissonance and drama revolving around a beat, playfully working together as a group of structured, but essentially skilled and free musicians.

Where are those guys?

Anyway. If you have any tips on how to handle discussions that are started but not properly resolved, feel free to let me know. Otherwise I’ll just be daydreaming about the thing we were talking about twenty minutes ago.