Jazz is my favorite genre of music. But I can enjoy other types for a few seconds.

Why Jazz?

The term "Jazz" encompasses a wide range so let's narrow it. I like New Orleans style Jazz with heavy "Bird" (Charlie Parker) overtones and a modern sound.

New Orleans Jazz is contrapuntal in nature. Each instrument plays off and against the other. Charlie Parker (Bird) was a true musical genius in the same rank as Bach (like a dog), Mozart and the other European greats. Parker's solos are what hooked me into Jazz. I never heard before anything so brilliant or moving. A Bird solo is it is like a story with many unexpected, amazing and titillating twists. The sound originated by Parker and Diz (Dizzy Gillespie) came to be called bebop or simply bop.

New Orleans + bebop = a jazz band where each musician is his own composer. For it to work, that is, tell a story that will evoke emotion, each musician must know what came before, what is coming and what everyone else is doing. It is a highly synchronized, multithreaded sound with counterpoint, shifts of rhythm, unresolved, dissonant, until the end – sometimes not even then – just like any great story. While the entire ensemble produce the story, solos also play in, each cat gets to dominate the conversation. I often get the visual of a field of wheat undulating in the wind with cross current waves. Then the wind direction changes. The whole field begins undulating in another direction. Very cool and how they do it is beyond me.

What does this have to do with ADHD?

Everything.

Why does it appeal to me? Why can I listen to a singular jazz work over and over when I am unable to make it through a single cut of most popular pieces. The multitudinous streams of sound forming a composite mosaic is what keeps my ADHD brain focused, at peace (for a change) and happy.

Charlie Parker made a triple asterisk of himself in his younger years. He had not yet mastered the saxophone sufficiently to produce the sound he was hearing in his head. His solos sucked. His head ran faster than his fingers. He was no child prodigy. Once he got the hang of it though, he changed the course of music.

If Bird went for an child psychological eval, what results do you think the creativity tests would have returned? What about IQ?

Charlie Parker died at the age of 34. The coroner estimated (wrongly) his age at between 50 and 60. He was a heroin addict most of his life. Self-medicating? My money says yes.

Was Bird's genius in spite of his tormented mind or because of it?

Perhaps the saddest tragedy was many a young less talented musicians turned to dope thinking it was Bird’s secret. The more dope Bird was on, the less creative/more sloppy his sound. Think about it. More torment. More creativity. Hmmmnnn. Whoops! Then again, brain/finger coordination suffered also. His brilliant phrasing, melodies and chords required a brain-to-finger direct connect.

The "why" of psychology is not easy to hit. Certainly tests do not tell it all.

Your take please.

Bob

I like just about all music (except for most top 40), but Jazz is my favorite as well. However, I tend towards the Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Horice Silver and into Grant Green, Donald Byrd and "Big" John Patton. I guess I'm geared more toward "typical" Jazz, whatever that means.

But its the tormented mind you speak of that really draws me towards Chet Baker over and over again. He was so messed up with life/drugs. There is a story by William Claxton (my favorite photographer) who spend a few years hanging out with the Jazz folks in it's heyday. He got to know Baker pretty well (as well as anybody could, he says) and took plenty of photos of him. Very beautiful, personal photos. He says, like 7 years later he sees this guy walking though the airport with a trumpet case in hand and only a t-shirt on in the cold Amsterdam airport and recognizes a very old looking Chet. He says Chet walked right up to him, didn't say anything except, "Hey Clax, do you have a few bucks I could borrow?" like they had just seen eachother a few hours ago. He gave him the cash and his sweater and that was the last he saw of him.

i like your thread mister bob.: D


What does this have to do with ADHD?

Everything.

Why does it appeal to me? Why can I listen to a singular jazz work over and over when I am unable to make it through a single cut of most popular pieces. The multitudinous streams of sound forming a composite mosaic is what keeps my ADHD brain focused, at peace (for a change) and happy.
i'm a big fan of jazz. i definitely feel the same way. i can listen to 19 minute jazz compositions but still manage not to stay around long enough to finish a song on the radio. i think this sort of temperament makes us good music critics, for we either like what we hear or we don't. we either listen.. or don't. : )

oh.. and i also love your observations about the music itself. some of my favorite jazz musicians come from the improvisation/avant-garde camp.. a sort of music without many patterns, structure, or defined end-goal.. which seems to match my personality quite well. i remember barely being able to listen to a four minute disco-electronica piece a few weeks ago because i felt exasperated from listening. ah well. : )

Cats,

Check out Joshua Redman's Mood Swing CD. The jacket says this:

"Jazz is not about flat fives or sharp nines, or metric subdivisions or substiture chord changes. Jazz is about feeling, communication, honesty, and soul." I might add, that means Jazz is ADHD.

Also I might add that jazz is experimental. Let's see what happens if we go beyond the accepted norm. Sometimes it flies and sometimes it crashes and burns. Sometimes it is liking flying a high perfermance aircraft. Many a successful athletic, businessman, doctor, and musician died piloting a bird too hot for them. Actually, the mentality of "I'm so good at this and that means I'm good at everything" kills them. The frenetic pace of bop is best left in the hands of the upper echelon. Parker invented bop. Many try to imitate but most fail. Ornette Coleman invented free jazz. Free jazz is a flow of consciousness without a predefined structure. But if a structure isn't defined somewhere along the path it flops. SB is the ultimate free jazz author. I first read SB and said "this cat is gone." Looked again, "this cat is cool." Looked again, "this cat is genius." That because there is rhythm and reason to ol SB's flow of consciousness. And its honestly is oh so refreshing.

Now to the point (finally). I inserted Mood Swing not too long after my first post. Listened to it while running an errand. I believe I listened first to "Rejoice." Bop at its very best. I listened in the light of my post. The intro, well let's get going here boys with the story. And the story does indeed begin, and builds and my ADHD brain is trying desperately to lock into one of the incoming signals. Can't do it. I get lost in the orgasmic cacophony. God, have mercy on my wretched soul, I pray. And he does, sort of. Rhythm and meter shift. Piano dominates the conversation. We go at it again. Another orgasm, finally happy, satisfied exhaustion.

Redman's next piece is Bosa Nova jazz and soothes my blown brain with harmonic pleasure.

Redman is a master. He doesn't qualify for genius because he is using the concepts of those that came before him. Sort of like our good fried Bill Gates. Hmmmmnnnn, maybe brains ain't that important after all.

So I must redefine my jazz subtype favorite to whatever the spirit of the moment calls for.

Bob

I've really tried to listen to free jazz and I just never clicked with me. I understand order in chaos, but still I can't get it. Of course, I'm still growing and I'm a quite a bit young in the liking Jazz area. I know that when that certain bit hits, I get goosebumps. I don't know why...I've never really been good at putting my feelings or emotions into words.

I was watching Jungle Book (the original Disney version) with my three year old son yesterday. My wife rented it and I haven't seen it for years. I was tapping my foot to the music as I read a mag thiking, "this music is pretty cool". Then the scene with King Louie (Louis Prima) came on and I thought, "okay, this is great!". I felt just like Baloo the bear when hear hears the music and is so mad they took the kid. He's standing there saying he's gonna beat them up, tear 'em apart all the while his head is boppin to the music. Finally the cat looks over to him and his eyes are in that Disney dream/hypnotized look cuz he just can't let go of that beat. That's how I am, I get transfixed and totally absorbed into it.

The sound originated by Parker and Diz (Dizzy Gillespie) came to be called bebop or simply bop…
Bird, Diz, Miles and Monk, and more than likely, Monk was the godfather…


What does this have to do with ADHD?

Everything.
Specifically, everything, too; the science we’ve found to be the plausible root of AD/HD describes exactly what these guys were trying to access.

Despite the claims of Wynton and some other apologists (no offense intended to any fans out there, I’m talking about a valid genre), jazz is not mature and limited to a recapitulation of what musicians like Charlie Parker and those upon whose shoulders he stood had to say.

We’ve long held that the travails of the superstars of the late Forties, Fifties and Sixties wasn’t so much an escape from the despair of living in a racist society (true as it was) as much as a dedicated attempt to self-medicate.

In other words, an escape from the side-effects of purposely going into those places that are opened up to us by the difference in how we use our brains.


Was Bird's genius in spite of his tormented mind or because of it?
Ooh! Multiple choice! I pick answer C: Yes.

You want tortured, check out the end of Monk’s career. He slowly stopped playing, stopped communicating, and finally told the woman he was living with “I’m a very sick man,” without specifying anything further.

Here’s a Monk story:

Monk had promised to do an interview after playing one night, and so he sits down at a table in the back of the club, just stuck in a corner of the kitchen really, with the reporter and one of the non-musicians that are an essential part of any touring effort; maybe his road manger.

The reporter asks Monk, “What kind of music do you like?” and Monk replies, “I like all kinds of music.”

The reporter immediately comes back with, “Sure, but I mean what kind of music do you listen to?”

Monk turns to the other guy and says, “I believe the gentleman has a hearing problem.” Then he stands up and walks out.

Now, how ADD is that? (grins…)

* * * * *

We have kids that play, one of which is currently a working professional jazz musician. Understanding this stuff was an essential part of their upbringing, and there wasn’t a bit of it they didn’t get.

In a way the point was to keep them from making the mistake of using, but the far more important point was to help them get to the level where they could stretch out in a serious way without needing anything artificial, either to get there or to handle the side effects.

Our standard working definition of any good improvisational music is that it represents a coherent logical walk through a complex abstract expressional space. After four years of formal education and several years as a working musician, the definition still stands.

When Miles (or Diz or Bird or Trane or whoever) stood up there and did that thing, everybody in the audience could follow him. That’s coherence, and what he did was take you further and further out, until all the sudden you weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Every step makes sense, all the way to a place that isn’t familiar at all. That’s the logic, and the logic is the message.

Lots of people in the audience made the mistake of thinking that because they could see the logic, they could find their own way out there. But it ain’t so; in a concert hall filled with trumpet players, there’s a clear reason that Miles was the one on stage.

It’s hard to see that, though, and we believe that’s why it seems like Bird inspired lesser musicians to try getting high. For our kids, it was important that they could recognize there was a legitimate reason that they were the ones up there on stage. It turns out they both have the trick, which we believed to be the case, but hey, we’re parents, after all.

The boy who plays professionally finished four years at a prestigious university as a jazz performance major, and he happens to be diagnosed (as Kay and I both are). He graduated near the top of his class, with some neat awards, but the real acclaim was the way the faculty and the other students treated him.

It finally sunk in for us that he got it himself at the end of senior year; we went to one of his recitals, and he came out on a bare stage wearing a black long sleeve shirt and black pants. He seemed like he was going to blow a few notes to warm up, and all of the sudden we realized he was blowing the intro to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

We could make out a drummer, bass player, and piano player in the shadows, and he proceeded to stand planted for about an hour and rip the entire suite. By the end we had realized it wasn’t exactly a standard recital, and the audience wasn’t who you would expect, either; lots of faculty, other staff, students one or two years past graduation, and people from the local jazz community.

In a way he was just showing off, like a joyful kid; the four of them were obviously having a terrific, fun time of it, loose as could be. They clearly knew they could nail it as casually as most of us can say ”Hi!” And nail it they did.

But I know he mainly did it for his mom, to say thanks, and to all the rest who had encouraged and supported him for four long years. He was showing everybody that what they thought they saw in him wasn’t misplaced, and he was doing it on several levels, including the long bow to Coltrane.

When he was done, everybody went nuts applauding; they wouldn’t let him off the stage until the people arriving for the next recital piled up in the halls and started to get restless. Very cool, and could you think of a more definitive way to put a stake in the heart of any uncertainty that might make smack seem attractive?

* * * * *

A big part of his academic career was balancing his drugs with the kind of work he needed to do. For the most part he didn’t take anything to play, even for classes, or he used Ritalin because it’s effects wear off pretty quickly. Our doctor considers it a part of his therapeutic regimen to control his meds appropriately himself, and he did exactly that, with only a few mistakes of judgment.

The odd thing is that while he preferred to be unmedicated when he was making a creative effort in school, now there are specific creative situations that he likes to be medicated for, too.

So: New Orleans or otherwise, jazz is alive and well, and your take is essentially in good agreement with ours. We’ve got some good evidence for the theory that it’s related to AD/HD, and related in specific ways, too.

In our theories of human communications, the role of art is to extend the common model of reality to areas it doesn’t currently describe. The shared model of reality is required to use language, so extending it is a chicken-and-egg problem. You can’t do it with words.

But you can do it with music, and if the current state of jazz is any indicator, we’ve got a lot to look forward to. Things have definitely improved since Bird’s day…

--Tom and Kay

I've really tried to listen to free jazz and I just never clicked with me. I understand order in chaos, but still I can't get it. Of course, I'm still growing and I'm a quite a bit young in the liking Jazz area.
Actually, free jazz is kind of young, too, despite the fact it goes back at least to the late Fifties.

What our boy Bry plays is free jazz, but it’s clearly found it’s way into new spaces. There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff going on right now out there, and I believe Bry’s quartet is going to be seen as the leading edge, when we look back in a few years.

The group’s stuff is incredibly orchestral; if there’s a hallmark of free jazz expression as a mature discipline, it’s that the mechanical devices that used to be necessary to break out of the mold are no longer in evidence.

These guys literally compose entire pieces on the fly, live, with minimal pre-existing structure and no mistakes. Then they come back six months later and compose the same piece again, live, totally improvised save for the name and a little descriptive structure you wouldn’t recognize as a chart.

The piece itself is instantly recognizable, though, despite the fact the performance is entirely improvised.

I love Ornette, and can listen to the most cacophonous pieces for hours, totally immersed in the experience. For a long time we were the only people we knew with a copy of Miles’ Pangaea. But the intentional discordant devices aren’t really necessary; listen to Monk play ‘in the cracks’ sometime, and you’ll see the master at work.

Perfectly sensible structure, familiar tunes, the whole bit, only he’s making you aware of logic that says this wrong note fits, somehow. The logic is the message, and today we’ve progressed to the point that we don’t need to break our own preconceptions down as dramatically to find our way outside, where the new stuff lies.


I know that when that certain bit hits, I get goosebumps. I don't know why...I've never really been good at putting my feelings or emotions into words.
…or maybe you’re fine at that, but what you’re exploring with your feelings isn’t a solid part of the common model of reality yet, so there literally are no words.

If so, you might want to get a copy of Bry’s first CD when it comes out next month. It was recorded in a 200-year-old church. (grins…)

I've really tried to listen to free jazz and [it] just never clicked with me. I
Me too. Jazz just hasn't made it with me yet.

However with the Internet, the range of music I like has expanded tremendously.

It is now something like Rob Zombie to Peter Paul and Mary with just about everything even a bit of Country in between.

I have no doubt when I get to listening to a bit more Jazz it will find a place in my likes.

- Vic

Our standard working definition of any good improvisational music is that it represents a coherent logical walk through a complex abstract expressional space. After four years of formal education and several years as a working musician, the definition still stands.

When Miles (or Diz or Bird or Trane or whoever) stood up there and did that thing, everybody in the audience could follow him. That’s coherence, and what he did was take you further and further out, until all the sudden you weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Every step makes sense, all the way to a place that isn’t familiar at all. That’s the logic, and the logic is the message.
Beautiful. Man, I knew it but couldn’t say it. "A coherent logical walk through a complex abstract expressional space." I struggled with it for years. Finally, I can go to my grave in peace. Bye.

Hold on now, I see there is more.

[Compressed stuff on your boy] - Extremely cool and you must be extremely proud. Heck, I'm proud that my world produced your kid :D


So: New Orleans or otherwise, jazz is alive and well, and your take is essentially in good agreement with ours. We’ve got some good evidence for the theory that it’s related to AD/HD, and related in specific ways, too.

In our theories of human communications, the role of art is to extend the common model of reality to areas it doesn’t currently describe. The shared model of reality is required to use language, so extending it is a chicken-and-egg problem. You can’t do it with words.

But you can do it with music, and if the current state of jazz is any indicator, we’ve got a lot to look forward to. Things have definitely improved since Bird’s day…

Tom and Kay, you cats made my day. I decided to put off the grave thing.

Marmalade man,

Don't look for jazz. Let it find you. I came from 60's Rock. Jimi Hendrix, Cream, etc. Then one day I hear this lick ... and I'm DEVASTATED. Who that? Turns out to be Charlie Parker. Twists and turns, vibrating harmonious dissonance, 9ths, 13ths, and 22nds (I don't think there is one, but anyway). And it all made sense. It was a coherent logical walk through a complex abstract expressional space. - Tom and Kay.

Just let it happen.

Bob

-M->ain;

-M->You said it, and who was it that said, 'Ornette Coleman', all over the insert of the CD borne of Bob's World. Dude, I'm not lying, it's factual and I'm sure that since whoever said what they said, then they did indeed say it ...
break;

... but not like before ...
... not like the last time, when you kinda' well wished... ... that if only some things could go unsaid ... ... you know, the logical zero stuff ... :-) ... from the illogical 1.
return;

-M->... for a reason ...
break;

... not a lie, I cannot lie ... not even a small likkle eensy weensy white one, George? 'No can do' ... sez George ... 'No can do ... ininehinnyinine head' ... 'three as sez make a wrong, even two as sez don't make a right, only halfa one as', sez George ... 'makes a right ... cheeky :-)'.

go girl;

-m->... lying is wrong, and so the credits roll. Morality taught in bite-sized chunks ... well, really Head of Programming ... what is morality?
return;

girl;

And so the land of the free was founded, two rights, one righter.
return;

-M->... So, if factual and not fiction, then I wonder, what would happen if we merged an anthology of the avant garde ...?...
break;

Let's remove the words from these tracks in our minds, and then overlay 'Science Fiction' track - 'science fiction' and 'Psyence Fiction' track - 'main theme' ... remembering ... lose the words ... dudes (Ornette, Shadow) ... you guys rock our World ... but what were you thinking??? ... ditch the words!!!
return;

-M->... and what we have is the soundtrack to the future ... resurgence de l'avant accompanying submergence du courant ...

end main;

REM :-) ; It's the end of the World as we know it, and I* feel fine, honest!

SB.

*We

REM :-) ; It's the end of the World as we know it, and I* feel fine, honest!
even
for those
who learned to play?
FORTRAN
on the 1108,
sedate
see data
see date

not so odd…

Good thread! I also like most kinds of music but find Jazz is one of my favorites. It's incredibly stimulating for me.

Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck are my two favorites...