A topic to which I have returned several times, I think.

I listened to some jazz today. Usually I get lost listening to jazz because I don’t know whether to listen attentively to every note – attention that usually seems to go unrewarded – or to let it all blend together, in which case it’s just background ambiance and I end up hardly noticing it at all until I realize that the CD is over. Today I was listening to “Kind of Blue,” which I’ve probably heard at least 50 times, if you count Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, and yet have never made it through a single track all the way from start to finish with confidence that I am getting what it’s giving.

But today I did; it fell into a slightly different groove in my attention and made more sense than usual.

In a lot of jazz, (at least “classic” jazz like this) the form is basically A A’ A” A”’… A. That’s a lot less form than the classical music I usually listen to, and even less than pretty much all pop songs, which generally have, at the very least, musically distinct verses and choruses, and frequently B sections and bridges and whatever else. The thing that had been difficult for me about jazz was that it was ostensibly all about virtuosic variety yet was shamelessly, fundamentally unvaried, just rolling around its little circular path of harmonic changes over and over. Those seemed like cross-purposes; I was trying to hear it either as something that surprised me (attending to the ins and outs of the solo lines to no particular avail), or something that didn’t surprise me (pleasantly “jazz-y” sounds for Starbucks), but it claimed to be both.

Today I think this: the real objective and pride of jazz is to maintain a single expressive moment from start to finish, to keep a vibe alive and unbroken. The challenge that the players are meeting as improvisers – the feat that, recognized, is satisfying to the listener – is that they are able to hold that particular vibe, that bodiless and undefinable thing, as their object, and manage to touch and retouch it with their solos. The purpose of the solos is not that they are variations on the theme, nor that they are “a piece he just made up on the spot!” – but that they are elaborations on the “meaning” of the head; they are an exploration of the territory of its emotional life. They are the spirit of the tune disincarnate from its flesh.

This skill of being able to move comfortably within an emotional moment, to really have mastered something as evanescent as a “vibe” and be able to toss it from hand to hand and draw faces on it without popping it, is, it seems to me, a social skill. It’s the same skill exhibited by a social virtuoso. Jazz, I realized, is about “cool” not just by association but by analogue; the form never changes because it is “playing it cool.” No need to rock the boat to have a good time; no need to change the subject, disagree, get too loud, too kind, too cruel, whatever. The measure of social acuity is the measure of how aware one is of the unspoken shared assumptions in the room, how closely attuned to the invisible glowing orb floating over the table formed by the strands emanating from each person. That’s how I picture it anyway.

So of course this ties in to my recurring theme on this site that all art presents itself to its audience as a kind of social encounter, where one is aware, to some degree, of an “other” with whom one has a social relationship. In fact, maybe that’s my great new biological, audience-oriented definition of art, completely disentangled from the notion of “beauty” (which always seemed like a misdirection anyway): art is that in which we subconsciously perceive an “other” even though there is none. Nobody will like this definition, but I kind of do. It means that a table that you are aware of only as a table is not, to you, art, but a table that gives you some impression, any impression, is. Are all impressions necessarily social? Well, yeah, maybe. Isn’t that where belief in God comes from?

Setting that aside, for the moment, this is somewhat less outlandish: People like music because the music seems to them to be a type of person – in the case of jazz, a socially “cool” person who “gets” the room; in the case of rock, a socially charismatic person whose magnetism drives everyone else’s experience (a rock song is the queen bee, the head bad guy, and we listeners are all his shoulder-hanging henchmen, delighted to be associated with him). Classical is more like a storyteller, an orator; it’s what he’s saying, and how he’s saying it, that’s to be enjoyed… But is he a good friend? Like, do we want him coming to dinner with us? He blanches behind his ruff! The feather on his puffy hat droops to hear you suggesting that you would rather “just hang” than listen to his finely honed rhetoric! “Oh? I need to ‘chill out??’ It is your very impertinence that doth chill me, sir!”

That silliness may obscure my point, actually. The point here is that a history of art may really be a history of interpersonal social standards – or social fashions, if you like. Classical Man, from whom we heard just now, wasn’t an oblivious nincompoop in his own time – he was just as socially astute, but attuned to different social fashions. Jazz has become a niche genre, perhaps, because “being cool,” in the sense I mean, is a niche social style nowadays. What’s socially “in” in our society? Fundamental alienation but with wild fantasies of innocent openness, is my one-phrase stab at it. Oh, but now there’s a new thing, this emotionally-underinflected “2.0” nerd-pride pragmatism, the aspirants to which can be recognized by how much they really, really, really like Obama. And more power to them, I say, but they’re not going to want to listen to classical or jazz either. Or they will, but only because they’ve attempted to move past their biological social selves and just accept all culture as equally googlable. They’re probably listening to some Bollywood showtunes/medieval madrigals right now.

I see the appeal in this mindset but find it fraught and ultimately insufficient. If one of these 2.0 people told me they loved me, I would feel uncertain. My life sure doesn’t feel like an Apple Store; can yours really? Where’s the beef, brilliant people whose time is now?

Ugh, I wanted really just to make this be about art as a social “other,” and the history of art being an encoded history of what it was like, socially, to be a human being in various places and times, but I’ve run aground talking about… Facebook or something. So it goes.

I read some guy’s blog the other day where he lamented that writing a blog is basically as difficult and as guarded as writing anything else, except with the added obligation to cultivate the impression that it’s casual and open.

He and I are operating in different paradigms, I’d say.