America as Jazz

And now for something completely different...

At the dawn of Jazz, Black Blues musicians and classically-trained Creole musicians began to make music in between the slow, deliberate Blues beats. Improvising as they went, they began to fill in the spaces with spontaneous creation. They used these spaces to express their musical creativity, individuality, cleverness and skill. Eventually they filled all the empty, unused spaces with sound and creation. Thus was Jazz born. Since then it has continued to evolve, where today it has become a bewildering variety of sounds, rhythms and styles.

Jazz was born in America, and some argue it could only have arisen in America. Maybe… but it is certainly the ultimate American music. In fact, I would argue that America is the equivalent in human endeavor to Jazz in music. Americans excel at, are even obsessed by, filling in the empty spaces between the slow, deliberate beats of human activity. As soon as any gap appears in what people can, will or want to do – somebody jumps in to fill it up. They do it to express their creativity, individuality, cleverness and skill. If “Nature Abhors a Vacuum”, then “Americans Abhor a Lost Opportunity”.

It doesn’t seem to matter where the Opportunity lies… business, art, science, politics, religion, … You name it and some American is looking for, or has already found, yet another new niche in that field. Skydiving? Exciting. Snowboarding? Cool. But wait – why not Skydive standing on a Snowboard? Yup. You get the picture.

Is this uniquely American? Certainly not. I would argue it is uniquely Human. Is it universal in America? Certainly not. It is something that comes and goes, and appears here and there. But for whatever reason, in the era in which we live, it is in America where that creative obsession finds maximum expression.

This is something that non-American’s, and probably a lot of American’s as well, don’t seem to understand, and that’s a problem. Most people in the world come from, certainly by American standards, very homogeneous places. Their country, or tribe or whatever, is fairly well defined by religion, language, race/ethnicity, and a shared history and geography. Their world is one where people are organized into large, distinct, easily identified homogeneous chunks. Their music is immediately recognizable.

America isn’t like that. America is so complex it’s incomprehensible. There is SO MUCH variety, SO MUCH variation, that it becomes impossible to digest. No empty space left free, no note left unused. And seen through a worldview used to grouping people into large, distinct, identifiable chunks, America is a MESS. In fact – it’s the classic melting pot. A whole pile of different cultures thrown together and melted into an undifferentiated goo. Musically it’s just noise.

But its not noise – its Jazz on a grand scale. Incomprehensibly complex, rich, varied and ever-changing. You have to understand that to understand this country. America is NOT the US Government. America is NOT mass-media culture. Those are products of the Law of Large Numbers acting on a riotously varied population. America is a state of mind, a way of approaching life that at its core is about individual expression and creativity. Just like Jazz.