So for the past couple nights I've been watching this jazz documentary on PBS in hopes that it would teach me how to appreciate jazz. Jazz is one of those things I feel that I should like — not because all the cool people like it or other such junior-high reasons, but because it seems to be an art form that provides many people with great enjoyment, enjoyment that could be mine if only I knew how they were processing it. And I've had flashes here and there of almost getting it: in high school, my English teacher once invited a jazz band — just bass, drums and sax — to play our school's auditorium, and it was actually really good, with one bassline in particular striking me as close to ambrosial. But that was the exception; when I hear jazz, I generally hear a bunch of busy noodling I can't follow.

So has the jazz doc helped? Quite the opposite — it's full of testaments to jazz's apparent immediacy to everyone but me. People unfamiliar with jazz wander into a club in a black neighborhood and can't help but dance; high school kids hear their first jazz record and immediately start their own band; this is music that grabs even the most reluctant listener, the documentary says, yet even though I'm actually looking to be reeled in, I sit at home stock-still, bored and ungrabbed. Probably the worst bits are the montages of Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet, interspersed with commentators declaring that this guy is God, yet all I hear is some guy blowing a horn. The tone that Wynton and Gerald and the rest say is so glorious I find quite grating; I never did care for horns, but surely if this guy actually is God he could make me like them? But no — Armstrong plays a melody, I sit there waiting for the good part (which never comes), and then some talking head says that the melody I've just heard could make the angels weep. How very edifying.

Then I grab a thirty-second clip of a fairly run-of-the-mill rock song (in this case, "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols) off the net and give it a listen, and bang, there's everything I've been missing for the last four hours: rhythmic hooks, melodic hooks, the immediacy, the feeling. This makes me want to pick up my guitar and learn how to play a cover version — and it's not by God but by a band whose last record I ended up selling. I believe I'll be skipping the rest of the jazz documentary.

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