Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum why do I hate jazz?

My taste in music that I love spans many decades and many genres.. I bet some folk would be stunned at some of the music I love..
However, when it comes to jazz, I balk, grow cold and want to have that same injection that my dog had for his very "final" injection.
My brain just seems to reject music that has, what seems to me to be no melody.
I am led to understand it's all very refined and clever, and has great technical merit.
But I still cannot fathom the point in that when you cannot leave humming a tune.
I suppose I am just an old romantic for melodic content.
Or is there a problem with my brain?

Maybe you have a preference for a certain style or era of jazz and not so much for another style or era. It has evolved over the years since Ragtime and Blues, so it has a wide variety of contributors to its evolution, which as well, contributes to its very broad definition. Variety does have a certain spice to it. I find that appealing.

Glen

It seems to me like you've answered your own question.

Glen, are songs like "midnight in moscow" and "tiger rag" jazz? because I do like them.. Thing is I can hum them straight off now if asked... It's the stuff that seems to be like everyone speaking at once without saying anything!
I am fully prepared to except its a problem with my brain, because loads of very musical and sensible folk do like jazz.
I must be missing something, I just dont get it. doh.

The two tunes you mentioned are examples of what would be considered older forms of jazz with a heavier blues influence. Perhaps you like some of the old standards (songs, show tunes) where the melodies are defined and as well the lyrics. Bebop and cooler forms of jazz evolved from that and became more abstract for some folks, but not for others. You have lots of choices to find something you like or not.

Ahh I think you may have just hit the nail on the head with one word there "abstract"
I am really trying to understand my shortcomings in this genre.
Oh no, just had second thoughts on the abstract part..
some folk thought The velvet underground were abstract and Tangerine dream., yet I didn't and don't.
This is hard, can it be that my brain has a short and hears modern jazz as too abstract a concept?

You don't like jazz? Here, try this on...

There is nothing wrong with your brain, you just don't like that kind if jazz. It's a personal taste thing. I like it but there's no reason for everyone to like it. Don't try to analyze it why you don't, you just don't.

I can't stand Bach or Mozart, they bore me and I can't listen to them long. I get ridiculed for that by people who think everyone has to like the same things they do. Absurd!

Nope, you're just fine, there's LOTS of music to listen to. Just listen to what you like.

It's all good.

Jazzyprof...
I listened to the Nat king cole, if thats "jazz" then it isn't the sort of jazz I meant...
When I fall in love had a nice melodic line, and the backing was restrained to a memorable rythmic plucking sort of sound, almost like a glen miller band on a valium day.. nice.
The sort of "jazz" I meant is the hectic -not - going - home humming - any - melody type...

Interesting conversation!!

Oh, but I somehow suspect that you do get it...and you're just trying to "pull our chains" to get a lively and perhaps heated discussion going just to break the all-pervasive boredom that some are claiming has settled in like a wet blanket over the Forums lately...Nah, you wouldn't do that...or would you?

But on the small chance that you're serious then you can be cured of your affliction by listening to the works of the contemorary (or smooth) jazz group Fourplay - especially when they play their signature piece "Foreplay"

Trap

Bach I can almost understand - but the only people who say they don't like Mozart are those who have never heard Mozart...

Trap

Rostosky - I know EXACTLY what you mean. I love and enjoy listening to a very wide variety of music - from Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin to Scott Joplin to Muddy Waters to Metallica and Slipknot and Spineshank. I can appreciate the beauty in an even larger body of music (like country and bluegrass and modern pop) even if I don't particularly enjoy listening to it.

But modern jazz.....I just don't get it. The abstract, dischordant, spontaneous stuff that follows no perceivable pattern. The stuff that is played live in bars full of silent Frenchmen smoking long cigarettes and wearing scarfs in the summer and sunglasses at night. The stuff that sounds like each band member is just tooting out a note once in a while to make his presence known. That stuff.

I'm with ya, bro. I don't get it either.

TrapperJohn....
I am being deadly serious, and am not pulling chains..absolutely not..... I am not bored either...
Look here is a link to the sort of jazz i mean, I just went to Youtube and found it, It has nothing to do with the group of musicians who are playing it...it could be anybody (and often is)
This is the sort of thing that I hear in supermarket isles and on films when there is 1970's cocktail party .
I am just trying to get an angle on what must be happening in my mind when i accidentally hear it...
for example, if you gave me a free ticket to a concert that featured this sort of music, I would happily pay £25.00 for someone to take the ticket off me.
Thats how much it actually "jars" in my brain.
The experimental music of tangerine dream and pink floyd as well as the velvet underground never had that effect upon me.
I have never heard Eric Saties vexations in their full "repeat 800 times" entirety, but I would rather than this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HN3nS5rUNs

Once upon a time I thought I didn't like jazz. But then someone gave me Bill Evans' Waltz for Debbie, and Miles Davis Kind of Blue.

There's all kinds of jazz, just like there's all kinds of "classical". Some of it I like, some of it I don't. I don't, for instance, gasp, "get" Coltrane. Yikes! But the 4-year-old daughter of a poster on another forum I'm in, when asked what she wanted to hear as background music for breakfast, tossed her hair and said, "how about a little Coltrane." We're all different, I guess

Cathy

The statements you make about jazz applies to any genre of music that's been around for awhile. Some Rock and Roll over its lifespan is pretty lousy, some is great. Same with Metal, same with, Blues, same with Country, same with "classical", etc.

You are not required to understand or even like every form of jazz, classical, rock, blues, country, blue grass. They all have their ups and downs over their lifespan.

Certainly, you are entitled to your opinion and if you are open to learning about more abstract forms, how it is constructed, etc, then you would have a more informed opinion. It matters not, really - whatever you like is fine and what you don't like you can, <<Click --->Next

Maybe you meant to say you "hate some specific aspects/genres of jazz". Hate all of it? I think you don't.

Glen

<snort> Now see, I liked that

Guess there's no accounting for taste, said the old lady as she kissed a cow. . .

Cathy

gahdzila... YES, thats it, thats what I meant that stuff...
Like six people all talking at once, out loud different stories at different speeds .
My brain warns me if I dont get it out of earshot it WILL grow a tumour.
I was trying to understand why, like you my musical apreciation spans many genres, The only thing that bores me (apart from the "J" word)is if I am at someones house and they have "every record" that blah did, or blah band and nothing else.
If they have Liszt,siouxsie and the banshees,fairport convention,Lou read, beethoven, Be-bop-deluxe, Tchaikovsky, Amy whinehouse even... amongst many others, then I am interested,because they have a diverse love of music, and not a restricted one.
At least my brain is in a minority of two now! lol.

But I wish I understood whats missing in my brain that other folk have working in theirs.

That sums it up. You're not alone with that one. Join the human race, as it were.

Oh, and jazzprof, that Nat Kind Cole was the tops.

Cathy