by Madhav Chari

Jazz music has four fundamental aesthetic elements: swing, blues, the romantic to meditative ballad, and afro-Hispanic rhythms (sometimes called “latin” rhythms).

Every crucial Jazz musician in the development of Jazz music addressed these four fundamental aesthetic elements. If any Jazz musician intends to make a deep and long-lasting contribution to Jazz, he or she has to work with, understand, digest and creatively re-imagine these four fundamentals of Jazz.

Each of these four fundamentals is related to feeling. Swing is the rhythmic push and articulation of rhythm in Jazz, with the 4/4 time signature as its main statement, and a way of organizing and perceiving time. We feel this in our bodies first, and swing gives the music its foot tapping quality. The same applies to afro-Hispanic rhythms. The romantic to meditative ballad by its very description intends to have an emotional impact on you. The Blues is not just a form of music, but a way of organizing music statements, for example what musicians call the 12-bar blues form. It is also a sensibility within Jazz music that allows you to direct emotions in a particular way together with a particular sense of melody that has a wonderful ability to tell a story through music.

For anyone who wants to obtain a deeper appreciation of Jazz, the very first step is to be able to FEEL these four fundamentals.

It is not about some intellectual memorization of arcane trivia of Jazz music that many misguided and misinformed aficionados of Jazz in India seem to gravitate to, with pretensions of intellectual understanding. It is not about reading what makes Jazz music work from some critic, mainly in the west, who for the most part may not actually have a depth of understanding of Jazz music, emotion, nor of western culture itself.

As a listener, and even as a practicing musician, one has to be able to feel first. THEN we can enhance our understanding of learning specific details of the music, which in turn brings more nuances to our feeling and at the same time brings more nuances of the music into our awareness.

When we see colors visually, even as children our eyes have the ability to perceive colors differently: we later on learn to label some colors as green, blue, red, and so on. But, the crucial fact is that we perceive the colors first without the necessity of verbal descriptions.

The very first step then before anything else is to start listening to Jazz music of the highest quality. I recommend listening to the same recording many times.

I mention the four aesthetic elements of Jazz, only so that it stays in your memory, in your subconscious, and over time you will learn to recognize and feel them.

But, where do we start? The net has a huge amount of information, not all of it accurate or even relevant, even shopping for CDs might be confusing since we may not know what to buy, and there is no way that by randomly buying we are sure to get something good.

I believe one has to start with the right music: listening to the right music can bring enormous dividends later, and not much later I assure you. You will be quite surprised how soon you start developing a feeling and then a sensibility for Jazz. I emphasize listening to the masters: that should always be your main reference point.

So with that in mind, I’d recommend Duke Ellington’s “70th Birthday Concert”.

Listen first, feel the music, and let it speak to you. I assure you that it will be the start to a wonderful journey.

(The writer is an international Jazz pianist and composer)