Jazz music scares some people. They say that jazz sounds weird. It sounds like music a cat could make by running across the piano. They're right: some jazz is weird. It's supposed to be. So why is that? The answer begins with one word: bebop.
What some perceive as weird jazz — bebop — began in the 1940s, when the focus of jazz shifted from the ears of the toe-tapping, dancing audience into the heads of the musicians themselves. Big bands played popular music, the musique du jour, and they cranked out dance music for the masses.
The musicians played the music that was written on the sheets laid in front of them. They wore the outfits that the bandleaders said they had to wear. Their jobs and paycheques depended on them playing the same songs over and over again. The public loved it, but did the musicians love it? Not all of them.
One of those musicians was a young Charlie Parker, who practised his saxophone as much as 15 hours per day. He was wickedly good. Parker heard music in his head that wasn't written on any of the big band charts. He could play any melody you threw at him, but he could also take the music to places no one had heard before. His songwriting and improvisation coloured outside of the lines. The music Parker played was lightning fast, most of it improvised, and technically extremely difficult. It was sound with tension that didn't resolve.
Musicologists will tell you that music is fundamentally made of two concepts: tension and resolution. If you tell a story about a terrible witch who steals children and plans to eat them, but you stop before the listener finds out what happens to those kids, then the tension of the story won't be resolved. If you tell that same story and take it all the way to its conclusion, where the children are saved and the witch is defeated, then the story is resolved. Bebop might sound weird because there's much more tension than resolution in that particular form of jazz. For the untrained ear, tension can be disturbing and unsatisfying.
Of course all jazz isn't bebop. So to paint all jazz as being weird is kind of like saying all rock 'n' roll is like Frank Zappa. Jazz has many forms that can beautify, delight and sometimes challenge. It's constantly evolving and growing like a sturdy oak tree.
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