Jazz explained in Jurassic Park terms for Carrie Bradshaw

写在前面：多年前写的烂尾文！！后面越写越像academic paper，can you tell I was a music major in college??

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I can’t stop thinking about Ray King, the ADD-inflicted jazz bassist who Carrie Bradshaw briefly dated for two episodes on Sex and the City.

To me, he is the most underrated male character in the show’s history. He is breathtakingly hot even by this show’s standards, and he actually has a personality besides being middle class and white. The Jersey Shore-bred manchild owns two jazz clubs in Manhattan, plays the bass in a jazz group, and lives in a loft in Queens. Meanwhile Mr. Big is a forty something corporate mogul that has the most generic white guy name and likes—who would’ve guessed—Sinatra.

“I don’t like jazz,” Carrie brutally breaks it to the jazz aficionado on their second date.

“Why would you say something like that?” Ray King groans and falls to the floor in dismay like a puppy.

“I dunno, you can’t follow it, and there’s no melody, and it’s just… it’s all over the place.” Carrie explains.

“Carrie, you gotta stop trying to make it be something else and appreciate it for what it is!”

I couldn’t help but wonder,

“Appreciate it for what it is” has now become one of my life mottos. When I first saw this episode, I might have agreed with Carrie on jazz being chaotic. The melodies and rhythms are disorienting, and amateur attempts to follow a piece of improvisation are usually met with frustration. How exactly does one listen to jazz, then?

By chance I found an answer in Michael Crichton’s sci-fi classic Jurassic Park. The book is about the downfall of a dinosaur theme park, predicted by Ian Malcolm the “rockstar” mathematician using chaos theory (Jeff Goldblum, who plays Malcolm in the movie adaptation, is a jazz singer/pianist/bandleader in real life, albeit not a very good one). The gist is that a complex system cannot be controlled because of the unpredictability of events—even zoos and regular theme parks are constantly undergoing glitches, sometimes resulting in casualties. Any effort to tame the nature is seriously misguided.

Malcolm’s idea boils down to that we are simply not in control of anything. He argues that sudden changes, like a car crash, are part of the “normal order of things.” To say something like a fatal illness is “beyond our control” is meaningless, because we never began to control anything. We can’t even control how our own mind works. If I tell you to think about an object (a dog, for instance), you will have no choice but to picture a dog in your head, and the thought of a dog will not go away however hard you protest it, until your mind gets distracted by something else. But that doesn’t mean I’ve managed to mind-control you, as I’ve simply manipulated a basic-level conditioned response that was one of the first things an average human learns when they start interacting with the world. Such irrational, radical changes, like the randomness of our mind, according to Malcolm, are “built into the very fabric of existence.” They can be as consequential and devastating as a car crash or as minor as the thought of a dog. Point is, these unpredictable events are the building blocks of our life, and they aren’t necessarily all bad.

Like a theme park, a piece of multi-part music is also a complex system. In the Western musical traditions, the practices of composing, orchestrating, and choreographing are attempts to be in control. The desired outcome is that, for example, an opera soprano can hit every note on the score with the precise pitch, duration, timbre, and intensity. That is certainly not the case in reality, because people are not machines. However, I’m not denying that classical music has its own merit. When it comes sufficiently close to that inhuman ideal, there is something sublimely beautiful about it.

Both classical and jazz training requires an incredible amount of discipline and dedication for instrumentalists and singers to be masterful. Jazz improvisers have to master an instrument fluently enough to deliver a musical idea as they think and reflect on their surroundings—be it the immediate setting on stage or the social context they find themselves in. Improvisation asks the player to be resourceful and make music with whatever that is at hand, which is at the root of jazz: it is when enslaved Black Americans, deprived of their material possessions, retained their musical traditions with empty oil drums as percussive instruments; it is when a saxophonist picks up a lick played by the pianist and refashion it into a full chorus; it is when jazz musicians actively explore and innovate new harmonies, scales, rhythms, forms, and instruments from India and the Caribbean.