My friend sent me a mixtape

Time to hear different

Strange things happen in your thirties. You become irrelevant. But instead of accepting this with grace, you desperately cling on, gestating within you a borderline intolerable personality. One that continues to hog the zeitgeist, unwilling to relinquish its toys to an upcoming generation desperately trying to push you aside. You nurture an arrogant entitlement toward culture only made worse by the fact that you actually have been around the block a few times by this point, you have seen some of the world, metabolised a portion of life’s rich tapestry. You are, in many ways, wiser than a twenty year old. But you’re not yet old enough to realise that you no longer matter. You are not the main character anymore. It’s supporting roles till death from hereon in. Accept your fate with grace.

How does one cope with this debilitating condition? I myself cultivate a mile deep inch wide approach to taste curation. Embrace ossification. Claim mastery over a tightly limited space to save yourself the indignity of intruding where you’re not wanted. Spend time putting down deep and lasting roots. By time, I mean the aching years of focus and meditation required to truly know an artform, to get under its skin and analyse its every orifice. To fully commit to this process is to relinquish any chance of hearing other music, let alone understanding it. Their content washing over me, gestures I have no business trying to decode, any complexity and nuance lost on my calcified ears.

This goes against the instinct of the serious music fan. They are forever attempting to embrace the world’s rich bounty. Regularly auditing their taste for variety and breadth. Many of my friends play this role of cultural safarist. Happily extending their tendrils into the cornucopia of music on offer to the modern fan. The asymmetry between us is, at its best, quality pub fodder. Generating lively and spirited debate despite our diverging tastes. At its worst, it results in me receiving a mixtape. How did it come to this?

On one such marathon pub opera, I was cornered into performing another clumsy rearguard action to defend my position. Why, my friends wondered, did I still refuse to engage with jazz? Have you no curiosity? It had been a long day. I was on the outside of many beers. I was not on form. Given space and sobriety I might have said something like “there’s a lot of music out there, I don’t have the time to familiarise myself with all of it in a way that I would find satisfactory, so I’m happy staying where I am for the foreseeable”.

But even this qualified retreat is a provocative statement for someone knee deep in the eclectic impulse of aging music fans. But its a common gambit when my friends and I are arguing. Grab the attention with a headline, and retrospectively defend it in meticulous detail, regardless of whether you actually believe what you’re saying. I might have started by framing it not as an intellectual claim, but one based on the pure experience of music. That I struggle to emotionally engage with music too divorced from what I already know about my taste. It’s not a hierarchical claim. It’s actually a kind of inverse cultural appropriation. In that I am so averse to cultural appropriation that I’m simply incapable of being moved by unfamiliar music. Maybe I would have reiterated that it was merely intended as a provocation. A corrective to dilettante overreach, at eclecticism for its own sake. It’s more about the virtues of intense intimacy with a limited cultural zone. It’s not actually a reflection of my own listening habits. Maybe I would’ve got carried away, and framed it in the context of a wider racial discourse. Highlighting that “white” culture plays the role of invisible default, its most profound achievements in pop culture since the 1950s the result of appropriation from non-white cultures, and that genres like metal and neofolk are examples not only of modern white culture, but demonstrate that white culture – far from being invisible – is actually fucking outlandish if left to its own devices. And that I enjoy spending time with this idea, trying it on for size now and then.

Instead I said I don’t listen to music made by black people…the awkward pause. Choose your next words carefully. They will make or break you. Shall I mention the Suffocation albums sitting on my shelf at home? We’re very close to a classic racist finger trap. The harder you struggle against what you just said, the worse it’ll get. So I didn’t struggle. I got up and left. I had a train to catch.

The crime: accidental racism. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: a mixtape. The moral: never provoke a newly recruited jazzhead. The rewards in seeing their face redden as you stubbornly rebut their advances are lavish, but the punishments in the form of a hefty mixtape are equally…lavish.

The setlist:

Given the dominance of household names, I must have emphasised my narrow horizons more than I thought. This might shock you, but out of choice or not, I’ve listened to some of these artists before. That being said, we certainly aren’t in Kansas anymore. So I resorted to Google for some on the fly curation to save me from devolving into inane babble.

Since receiving this tape, I’ve been interrogating why this sort of jazz does nothing for me. Is it association? For example, late Romantic music’s association with Looney Tunes style cartoons in the modern Western mind is so close that hearing the music afresh, divorced from absurdist imagery, is an act of sheer will many are incapable of. It just sounds like a chaotic mishmash if not regarded with the proper attention. Similarly, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, the loose, swinging exchange between brass and piano are so closely connected in my mind with images of smoky bars, grainy black and white footage, American mid-20^th Century urban sprawls, decoupling it from this and accepting it on its own terms takes some mental gymnastics. Even the Debussy-esque flowing piano lines of Nina Simone fail to transport me.

Maybe it’s education? Admittedly my formal music training ended nearly twenty years ago. But the association of jazz, and for that matter samba and salsa, with dry academia – list the time signatures, name the cadence, improvise for eight bars in the key of G – has stripped it of all joy. The tedious jazz and blues exercises my first piano teacher Keith foisted on me have left lasting scars. Why then, you ask, were you able to cultivate a love of classical music? Surely no other form has been sapped of joy by dry academic study than classical? It’s the bane of any young student’s life.

I think this is because when I was sixteen my parents switched me to a new piano teacher. A wizened old woman called Eleanor. Her passion for classical was intoxicating. Her arthritic fingers danced over the keyboard with an athleticism that put my fresh young hands to utter shame. I’m pretty sure the last non-classical album she encountered was Revolver. Other forms of music just didn’t exist in her world. It was all she ever needed out of life. She taught me that Bach sounds good at any tempo, so always prioritise him in your practice and play it slooow. She taught me that Beethoven’s mastery of chords is still unmatched. She encouraged me to take joy in his first piano sonata despite it being beyond my abilities. She taught me to enjoy spending time in every bar, there’s a wealth of artistry contained in each moment. She taught me about modern dissonance, the physicality of Chopin’s leaping octaves. She imbued within me with a passion for classical that the rather procedural Keith was unable to do for blues and jazz.

Eleanor’s hyper fixation probably influenced my attitude to other genres more than I realised. The idea that you can spend your entire life with one – admittedly broad – form of music and understand it with a degree of familiarity bordering on the pathological. Her influence on me is something I’ve not thought about for some time. Unpacking it all these years later is illuminating.

Or maybe it’s because I’m a screaming racist. A lot of the jazz on this tape flows with the informality of a conversation, totally distinct from the preconceived narrative forms I tend to favour. It requires a different ear. I think I’m starting to hate conversations. Conversation is what got me here. Remind to avoid them in the future.

Miles Davis’s ‘A Tribute to Jack Johnson’ fairs better in the ensuing carnage between me and jazz. The tension of the stop/start rhythm, the intentionality of the trumpet lines allows me to decouple the instrument from its inherent whimsy in my mind. The Fripp-esque world building in the tentative guitar chords, degrading the building blocks of riff into a looser cement, a more flexible module of composition.

Mulatu Astatke takes us forward a bit, he is “an Ethiopian musician and arranger considered as the father of “Ethio-jazz”” according to Wikipedia. A more organised, consistent presentation, the playful polyrhythms holding my attention for a time. This in turn is followed by Ornette Coleman. More brass, more loose rhythms. I enjoy the idea of exploring more jazz. An urge that quickly dissipates when I sit down and listen to it. Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ brings a necessary change of pace and genre. But whatever is actually going on confirmed my suspicions on my relationship to Marvin Gaye, a cold, indifferent, and very distant one.

I guess my friend pictured me putting this tape on late at night, with a glass of whisky, maybe some light reading. I would press play, and let the music flow over me as I discover a new world I had never fully regarded with the attention it deserves. Whilst this expectation wasn’t entirely unrealistic, it underestimates the amount of damage of I’ve done to my brain since Keith’s repetitive blues drills. Not the good kind of damage. Metal, classical, ambient, neofolk, what these genres have in common is their need to over explain themselves. They make pretty damn clear to the listener what they’re about, telling you in no uncertain terms where to look at any given moment. There’s always a main character, a clear thematic or aesthetic intent flowing through each passage. An insistent flow that’s pretty hard to miss. That’s why I favour them. I don’t listen to music to furnish my day-to-day activities with a soundtrack, I listen to music to listen to music. I therefore need music that spells itself out for me.

If we set aside that ingrained cultural programming immediately delivering a series of images into my brain whenever jazz or funk is playing, it’s actually pretty ambiguous music. The material I’ve been tasked with here is multi-dimensional, simultaneously flying off in several directions, leaving sentences unfinished, transferring to a fresh segment only tangentially related to the last. I cannot, to borrow a phrase, get my ear into it.

The tape finishes with Public Enemy. I’ve heard of these guys. It’s not a particularly original thought, but I don’t think middle class white guys, especially the English variant, should be listening to this sort of thing for pleasure. It’s not for people who grew up in Southwest Surrey. It feels voyeuristic. I’m witnessing something I shouldn’t. I shut the tape off before someone catches me.