What Do The Lay-Folk Hear When Listening to Jazz?

What I meant was, Jazz can be very technical, and tends to be more appreciated by musicians and people who study it, so I was wondering what, if anything, non-musicians enjoy in it or listen for in it.

Flashback to an Elio Villafranca conert. (Elio Villafranca: young, very capable Cuban-bron pianist living in the U.S. and doing Latin jazz. I enjoy watching him play incidentally.) I remember the trumpet player he was playing with doing a lot of fast runs. Lots of energy and excitement right? But I'm not feeling anything.

I don't know that I can describe what I like about the jazz I do like (which is 85% Sun Ra, though I think that's gradually going to change thanks to some newer avant-garde jazz performers I am enjoying), but generally it sounds good as well as making me feel something I enjoy feeling (even when its a reflection of the darker side of things).

X-post:

I'd like to say more about what I enjoy, but I am too tired right now. Somehow it's easier to talk about the stuff I don't enjoy. I don't have the terminology. I don't know what's actually going on in music, technically. I'm just going to say stuff like, "I like the way it builds up and comes together" which could just as easily describe things I don't like.

http://www.bpfrommer.com/new_images_14/Kenny%20G..jpg

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/finch2/Images/finch2-5-3.jpg

not consciously, i don't think. like when you're reading a novel you don't necessarily think oh s/he's written it like this cos of this and s/he's setting up this feeling by using this and this character is a metaphor for this or whatever.

unless you're studying it for an essay or something.

I sometimes think of it being kind of like watching baseball and knowing "Hitting the ball and running to the bases is good, missing or having the other guy catch the ball is bad, etc." versus knowing about bunting and infield flies and tagging up and pinch hitters and stuff like that. You could still enjoy the game somewhat with the first understanding, but the second might give it a more specific meaning.

Even knowing how to follow the music, I still prefer the transcendent moments when the energy and excitement is so great that I don't think about that stuff too much. But it becomes second nature after a while -- I can't help dissecting jazz even while enjoying it.

Of course there are many ways to listen, etc. etc., and I think there is a whole lot of jazz out there that is direct enough to appeal easily to non-musicians (this is a good thing). However, I also remember Miles Davis 'Sorcerer' sitting under my bed for YEARS because it was too much and too out for me to take in.

as for me, with no schooling in jazz, i tend to like it when it's either catchy or just really beautiful, and i tend to not like it when i can't hear that. catchy could mean anything from louis armstrong to charlie parker to, oh, some arthur blythe. (if you want to read into that that i don't pay attention to a lot of current jazz, you'd probably be right.) beautiful meaning, for example, eric dolphy doing "come sunday."

i own several miles davis cds because i've tried to see my way through to them the way that everybody else obviously does, but i never really have, which i'm sure makes me a total mutant or something.

I concur with xpost about Tony Williams.

*similar reaction to when ppl do cuts of certain rappers in hip-hop.

(Playing around at school aged around 11 or 12 some of us would pretend to "be" a trad jazz band, making trumpet noises and clarinet noises and drum noises and such. I'd stress none of us were familiar with jazz except what you might hear occasionally on tv or radio, I think the idea was more that it was a funny thing to do. But I still think we managed a surpisingly good facsimile of what a jazz band would sound like. It's surprising how much of this kind of stuff people pick up without realising it).

Obviously the more talented you are and the better trained you are you will hear different things. I'm a jazz fan but I'm sure I don't hear what Herbie Hancock hears when I'm listening to jazz. Sometimes I struggle to hear exactly what's going on at a concert, whereas he could probably go home and play most of it from memory.

Jazzbo, I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think it's fair to assume that if I am following the meter, chord progression, I enjoy the tune less than other people. That stuff eventually becomes internalized -- you don't have to think about it much and can still sit back and find the music mezmerizing and exciting.

Then again, I haven't studied or played jazz for several years, and I may have regained some enjoyment I had lost.

My Favorite Things was the first jazz I remember hearing (around age 14), and the mood and texture of it was what struck me so deeply, but I could probably tell that there were patterns and whatnot (fairly easy to detect in that one).

To listen to jazz you do have to train yourself to listen a different way, or at least be the type to listen critically and follow the music. Jazz mostly doesn't work well as background music.

I took a jazz history class in college that had a huge influence on my listening and learned the music chronologically with a bit of theory thrown in, so I insist that hearing the early New Orleans group improvisation first-- and up through big band, bop, hard-bop-- gave me a distinct and well-earned appreciation for free jazz, which these days is the bulk of my jazz listening. A lot of the stuff I really like now doesn't even have chord changes or meter, but it's still cool. Know what I mean?

Yes. The best moments for me in jazz are still of the sort when Herbie Hancock plays some short, off-kilter sounding phrase and then Tony Williams goes "bash b-bash BASH!" and I'm certainly not thinking "Oh, he played off the flat 9 and 13 of that chord"