Entertainment
How I learned to love Jazz Fusion, the worst music in the world
It started innocently enough. One morning I was racing to get the twins to preschool, an endeavor that seems as simple as driving from point A to point B, but in reality (as parents know) tends to resemble a high-pressure race against time in a movie about hostage negotiators. After I packed my nut-free snacks, filled my water bottles, and strapped the twins into the maze car seats despite wasting 30 minutes begging with them for socks, I breathed a sigh of relief and tapped the car radio.
I laughed when I heard the song. So did the twins. After all, the song sounded funny. That’s the thing about jazz fusion: it sounds Ridiculous, and any creature’s central nervous system will recognize it instantly. I can’t remember what the song was. I didn’t imagine myself Wants to remember. It may have been “Mile High” by the Yellowjackets. or “Love on the Road” by Dave Cos. or “PP Head” by Headhunters. Or “The Hideaway” by David Sanborn.
All I know is that it came from a wide range of music that I’ve spent my whole life making fun of and trying to avoid.
This does not mean that avoiding it is a viable option in the USA. Jazz fusion envelops us. It washes over us in orthodontist’s offices and malls, in cramped hotel lobbies and gaudyly lit stores. Like a weighted blanket or a waterbed, it’s designed for comfort but only draws attention to its silliness. It’s silky saxophone music played by guys who look like Greg Kinnear. It’s the music that makes the song titles themselves moot because each track is just another synthetic stack of cascading wind chimes, rococo drums, keyboards that seem to have escaped from the secret laboratory of ’80s sitcom theme songs, and bass lines that make popcorn noise pop. Jazz fusion is the only form of secular music in which it would be completely normal for everyone in a band to go out on stage in matching Christmas sweaters. There are millions of people in the world who pay money to go to concerts where jazz is performed, and I will never stop finding it fun.
But here I was listening to it in the car, and for the first time in my life I didn’t reflexively change the channel.
What’s so strange? I haven’t changed the channel in weeks. I should note that when we rented the car, the only preset station on the radio was WBGO, 88.3 FM, and I left it that way because I don’t have a lot of free time to fiddle with the dashboard and because WBGO offers amazing combos of classic jazz and R&B. What I didn’t realize is that WBGO peppers copious amounts of jazz, especially in the mornings – although I think “pepper” is the wrong word because pepper indicative spices. Anyway, what I find these days is that I dove into the front seat after a mad rush of the car with the twins, started melting in my morning tints of Spyro Gyra and Fourplay, and I Such as He. She.
I really liked it. (And to be clear here: I’m not talking about the genesis of the spiky, funky, early-’70s fusion of jazz with acts like The Weather Report and Miles Davis albums like Brew bitches And the in the corner. That music has always been great – and it just seems to get brighter with each passing year. No, I’m talking about what happened in the aftermath of those sad breakups, when jazz fusion stopped sounding like Miles Davis and started sounding like Mannheim Steamroller.)
For someone like me, someone who has watched the documentary The Velvet Underground three times and has spent decades analyzing every phrase and shaping the many tormented authors (Charlie Parker, Nick Cave, Kurt Cobain, Marvin Gaye, Leonard Cohen, you could probably fill out the rest of the list without my help), this is heresy. I will freak out my 14 year old self. So is my 54-year-old self, and I’m 55. For a while I wondered if it qualifies as one of those “the pandemic changed me” quirks. I always used to hate the dreary monotony of Pink Floyd, for example, but somewhere in the spring of 2020 I started playing The dark side of the moon Over and over again (much to my family’s dismay) and this up All. suddenly. made. sense.
It might be something else. I can’t help but think of my dad and how, back in the 1980s in Southern California, my family would pile into the car to go to church on Sundays, and my dad would double down on our Presbyterian pastorship by running a radio station specializing in what was then called “easy listening” music. I don’t mean easy listening like Lionel Richie songs. I mean easy listening like Percy Faith and Ray Conniff – the now-forgotten bandleaders who churned out the quietest, antiseptic white bread gruel in the history of recorded music. By this time I was already deep into the Clash and Elvis Costello, and was regularly and indignantly asking my dad why we had an auditory lobectomy. He would say, “It relaxes me.”
I get it now. Why do I give up—and (god help me) a jazz fusion fan when I move my twins into preschool? Because it relaxes me.
I may have been marinating in doom and gloom for too long. It’s refreshing to listen to musicians enjoying their lives and knowing how to play their instruments, from the grating and swaying sounds of things, and not having much to say. It’s nice to play something cute in the car, even when I can still hear my high school English teacher in the ’80s telling me to stay away from the word “cute” because it makes no sense. What is wrong with meaninglessness? What’s awful about cute?
Earlier this year, I watched Penny Lane’s provocative documentary Listen to Kenny G, about the emperor of smooth jazz, and it made me wonder why I’d been such a snob about music for so long. Part of me longed to dismiss all Kenny G fans as philanderers who should listen to real jazz like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, yeah, sure, but then again what’s the point of discouraging anyone from listening to music that makes them happy? I don’t understand Kenny G fans, but I kind of envy them. How would it feel to bypass the darkest, most perverse, and saddest forms of musical expression and succumb instead to an upbeat soundtrack of jazz in the supermarket aisle?
Am I going to get progressively happier, too? Calm down with the kids? More confident, even? Because think about it: someone who’s rolling down the street blowing Dave Koz out of his car? This is the person who does not care.
Jeff Gordinier is Esquire’s food and beverage editor.
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