Explaining Trump to My Foreign Pals

Hi There Friends-

I am not particularly shooting for having a political blog, nor do I think I have anything that's a lot smarter or more well-researched to say about the current political goings-on in America than the experts whose articles and blogs I read.  That said, I have a Facebook feed full of friends from (and in) other countries who are clearly mystified by the popularity of Donald Trump, and so I write this mainly to address them directly and try to break it down (as I understand/observe it) so that it makes sense, because, as horrifying as he and his candidacy are, they make perfect sense:

We have two parties, Democrats and Republicans.  Abraham Lincoln was a Republican; it started as a progressive party, the slogan of which was "Free Labor, Free Land, Free Men." (Thanks to Kyle Saulnier for hipping me to that.)  The 'Free Labor' doesn't refer to slavery, but to the idea that laborers should be free men, not slaves actual or otherwise to their employers.

At some point around the time of Nixon (the 1960s), the parties flipped, for a lot of complicated reasons, but mainly because Democrat party was split between Northern progressives and southern populists who also happened to be the strongest supporters of institutional racism, segregation, etc.  Nixon's 'southern strategy' of catering to racists and conservative religious people basically flipped those people (southern Democrats) into being Republicans.

Now, in 2016 in the Republican party is basically a combination of people who want to make (and keep) as much money as they can (to the detriment of everything else,) and people who have an ideological opposition to the federal government, taxes, etc.  But there aren't enough rich people and/or people who don't want the government to do anything in this country for Republicans to win elections based on their votes. So they need to bring in more people.  Firstly, they brought in religious people, who will pretty much vote for anyone who says that they are against abortion and gay marriage.  So as long as you don't have a conscience, it's easy to get those people on your side.  But even those people are not enough to do it.

So to get more votes, the Republicans started appealing to uneducated white people. Now, uneducated white people generally are helped by government programs like social security, Obamacare, unions, etc, and the money/we-hate-the-government people that run the Republican party don't like those things.  So in order to get uneducated white people on their side, they have to convince them of a few things that are not true.  (This apparently not terribly hard, given their lack of education and desire to blame someone for their problems... that last bit is pretty universal.) So the money/government-is-bad people tell the uneducated white people who are struggling to find good jobs, save money, retire, etc, that the reason they are having those struggles is because the government is taking money and resources from them and giving to even poorer brown and black people, and immigrants.  Then they say they're going to 'make America Great Again,' which is a sort of code for 'we're going to crack down on black and brown people and immigrants and keep them from getting the stuff the Democrats want to give them, and it'll be like it was before the civil rights movement.'

Of course, the real reason these poor uneducated white people can't get ahead is because their job got moved to India or China, they can't afford to go to college, and government programs that would make healthcare and childcare and public school better are being blocked or destroyed by the traditional money/anti-government Republicans.  But the uneducated white people would much rather blame the people who make them uncomfortable anyway, mainly the black and brown and gay and foreign people, and the white people who make any effort to get along with those people.  (You have people like this in your country too, they're everywhere; I think in Europe they're generally called 'nationalists,' but mainly they're just mild-to-medium racists who believe people who are not like them are a danger to them.)  So the Republicans tell the uneducated white people that that's who's to blame, and then tell them that if they just get the Democrats with all their help for black and brown and gay people and regulations on bank and business out of the way, the uneducated white people can all start small businesses and become rich.

Enter Donald Trump, a rich white man who tells poor white people that the problems in this country are Mexicans, Muslims, and liberals, and that his solution is to make the federal government less like a government and more like a business, which will then make everyone rich winners.

You have probably observed that this is what he says, and what he is doing.  I'm just letting you know that he's only saying what Republicans have been saying for 30 years, but louder, and meaner, and more plainly.  He didn't come out of nowhere.  He makes perfect sense.

Bobby Hutcherson - a reason to listen to the vibraphone

Today is Bobby Hutcherson's seventy-fifth birthday.  I am pleased to see it recognized, at least among my circle of friends and weirdos I don't really know on Facebook.  I was VERY pleased to watch this episode of 'A Night in the Life' featuring Bobby, in which he beautifully discusses aspects of his own history as well as describes his day-to-day life.  (Watch it here.)

I have been trying to make music on the vibraphone since I was about fifteen years old, and for the first decade or so I was at it, my nearly entire focus was on jazz music.  Bobby was not the first vibraphonist I ever heard; I'm sure that distinction goes to some mix of Lionel Hampton (with Benny Goodman) and Arthur Lyman (with Martin Denny.)  I have the strange sensation my Dad had a stray Cal Tjader record in his collection, the origins of which are a mystery, and may have involved a woman. As I began to take the vibes more seriously, I dutifully (and rewardingly) listened to a lot of Milt Jackson's recordings; my favorites are not with the rather predictable Modern Jazz Quartet, but with Monk, with whom he paired so well and played so differently than with anyone else.  I enjoyed the small amount of Victor Feldman's vibes playing there is to find, and marveled at the novelty of hearing Red Norvo's trio with Charles Mingus and Tal Farlow. I was of course blown away by Gary Burton's innovative four-mallet techniques and fluidity, as I am now, and always dug the aggressive bebop fire of Dave Pike (Milt Jackson gets called the 'bebop vibes player' because of time and place and associations, but he always sounds more like a gospel singer or an organist's right hand than like Bird and Diz on the vibes, to me,) and the undeniable individuality of Walt Dickerson and his tiny, lightning-fast mallets.  (I was also into latter-day heroes like Joe Locke, Steve Nelson, and Stefon Harris, but they're of a more recent generation, and unavoidably have less mystique as a result.)

Bobby Hutcherson has easily had the biggest impact on me of any of these great players, and his are, to be honest, the only vibraphone-led albums I find myself wanting to listen to, some ten years after being so fully immersed in both the jazz and vibes worlds.  He recorded on Blue Note with a who's who of great and influential musicians; most of his records from the 60s feature the piano playing of either Herbie Hancock or McCoy Tyner, his drummers Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, until he started making collaborative records with the deeply interesting (and apparently quite hard to deal with) Joe Chambers.  This is all pretty easy to look up, so I shan't go on, book report-style. All I'll say is, the writing on Components, Oblique, Total Eclipse... he's just got a deep talent for making memorable melodies over challenging harmony, in a way that I think often gets attributed only to Wayne Shorter and Herbie.  The music on those albums has that wonderful and now-lost blend of easy-to-understand, almost Horace Silverian composition, combined with a freedom in the solos that allowed for real stretching.  (Makes sense, Bobby's earliest well-known sideman roles in New York were with Eric Dolphy on Out to Lunch and Archie Schepp live at Newport.)

But beyond (and perhaps more important than) these great recordings, Bobby had a profound affect on me when I saw him play live.  The first time was probably in 1999 or 2000, when I was still a teenager, mentally if not legally.  He played music from his only Verve album at the time, Skyline, at the old Iridium, by Lincoln Center.  (That album remains one of the absolute best acoustic jazz albums from that era; great writing, and Bobby was on fire.) His command of the instrument, his presence in the room while still being able to be transported; his focus!  I could not believe how well he played, but it was so much more than that; it was the look in his eyes, it was the weight and magic in the way he stood. I seem to remember chatting with him nervously after (I tend to get quite bratty around celebrity; Bobby Hutcherson is one of the few people who I know I can expect will pull the air from my lungs when I see him walk into a room I am in,) and found him to be a very gentle, charming, quiet man.  None of that was evident while he was playing.  He moved like someone was controlling him with a force he was a little bit afraid of.  (I use past tense only because it's been a number of years since I've seen him live.) And it made the music feel so full of power, and potential, and danger. On another occasion at (was it the Jazz Standard?) I remember his apparent possession was even deeper; clicking his mallet handles like some kind of ritual rattle, and bringing them together on giant bombs of rhythmic cadence during other people's solos, as if he was willing grand moments into being, as if he could feel them coming 30 seconds ahead of time. Felt like magic.  Maybe it was.

Now Bobby is older, and keeping mostly close to home in the Bay Area, an oxygen tank always nearby, enjoying flowers and sunshine, apparently immune to the aging jazz musician's syndrome, the symptoms of which are talking a ton of shit and wondering why they're not more venerated.  He should be; for me, he's speaking the kind of truth and playing the kind of music that people only seem to expect to hear from Wayne Shorter (whom I love dearly, mind you,) and the recently departed Charlie Haden and Paul Motian.  But he seems to be happy about where he is on his seventy-fifth birthday.  I've no great witty conclusion to this blatant fan-post, other than to encourage to listen to Bobby's brilliance on the following:

Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch

his own Components and Oblique on bluenote

his record with Tommy Flanagan called 'Mirage,' featuring some of the most beautiful marimba playing ever done

the aforementioned 'Skyline,' still quietly one of the best jazz recordings of the 1990s,

and an Abbey Lincoln record from 2000 called Wholly Earth where all of his subtlety, power, warmth, spirituality, and sense of humor comes into play.

Happy Birthday, Bobby.  Thanks so much for all you've given me.  May you live as long as you want to.

Amber Coffman and Beyond: Sexual Harassment in an Industry With No HR Department

I don't know Amber Coffman.  I think we probably have a few mutual friends, but we've never met.  Even if I did know her, I could not say that I know for certain she's telling the truth when she says a music PR guy "rubbed my ass and bit my hair" against her wishes in a bar a few years ago. (She just revealed that in a series of tweets, and it's now a story being posted around Facebook.)  I'm not accusing her of lying, not one bit, I'm just acknowledging that we're talking about something someone said on Twitter, not something that was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt in a court of law.

(read the story here http://pitchfork.com/news/63017-dirty-projectors-amber-coffman-best-coast-and-more-accuse-publicist-of-sexual-misconduct/)

That said, there's a reason I find it incredibly easy to believe, the same way it's very hard to see any bit of doubt in the case(s) against Bill Cosby, with his tens of accusers. (And not, as an alarming number of friends and people I look up to seem to believe, because he's a black celebrity I want to 'take down.') The reason is because I have observed this phenomenon in one form or another with basically every female artist I have worked with in my 15 years of professional music-making in New York; they probably number more than twenty-five, and I've heard about it first-hand from scores of other female colleagues and friends.

Let me quickly clear this up: none of this is to say that all my wondrous female performer friends shouldn't sleep with any and every older man in the business (or anyone else for that matter) who catches their eye; this is about not being able to do one's job (or pursue one's artistic dreams) without being bothered if not straight-up made to feel in danger by everyone from annoying nobodies to gatekeepers and idols.

Sexual harassment. Look, yes, it runs a range.  At the very least, I have observed every female artist I have ever worked with receive comments (supposed 'compliments') about her appearance from fans, bandmates, bandleaders, clubowners, managers, producers, ""producers"" et al that go beyond just the minor offense of focusing on their looks rather than their art. They tend to be overly specific and creepy, or else some variant on 'You look so good that I'd like to...' There's often unwanted personal communication, like middle of the night texts from someone who's supposed to be booking gigs for them, or flowers with a winky card from the curator of a series. With older grandpa guys, there's a cheek kiss they try to turn into a kiss on the lips, an arm around the shoulders or hand on the back that stays there too long.  Sometimes there's a weird, quasi-business-sounding 'you should come up to the Catskills sometime this summer,' or an overt 'we're going skinny-dipping this weekend, come join us!'  Every so often it's just a 65-year-old man with power or perceived power in the 'industry' straight-up propositioning a young musician in her mid-twenties in the phony spirit of 'I'm from the 60s/70s, when attitudes were different.'

Attitudes have always been the exact same.  Men try to use any power or status that comes their way to have sex with women who are younger, better-looking, more intelligent, more talented, and more interesting than they, and tend to do so in the rudest, most expedient, transactional way possible. This exists in every walk of life and every conceivable career and industry, but it feels especially rampant in the entertainment world because a) professional female entertainers are not taking their careers very seriously if they don't try to make themselves as attractive as they possibly can when they perform (so people are constantly seeing them in sexier clothing and more makeup than you'd expect to see your lawyer or dentist or head architect in,) b) quite often a vibrant flirtatiousness is (true to the style) 'part of the act,' (in cabaret, jazz, country, etc etc etc,) and people get confused and think they have the right to engage the performer in that arena the same way idiots think they can take a swing at Jason Statham in a bar because they saw him in an action movie, and c) there is no human resources department in the world of freelance art.  If a veteran musician hires a woman to play a gig with him at a club and says lewd things to her or pinches her ass, there is no one to formally complain to, no one who's legally bound to then relieve him of his job, or allow her to walk off the job and still get paid.  This kind of behavior is generally expected and accepted from major artists, and it's often played up as part of their persona; "oh, careful, sweetheart, he LOVES the ladies..."

It's also expected from the non-talent in the industry: bookers, agents, money men, venue owners etc etc etc, but in much less of a romantic sex, drugs, and rock n roll way and in much more of a 'guys with money and power think everything belongs to them' way.  As someone who has played with these shiny entertainer women, been employed by them, hired them, and dated them, when I see this behavior, it makes me want to kill.  Firstly, I just want my friends to be happy and comfortable and free of fear and the feeling of being objectified.  Secondly, these are some of the greatest musicians and artists I know, and I find I'm ecstatically making (their) great music with them to the thrill of a big crowd one minute, and the next, I watch them take the $60-on-a-good-night it earned them and walk across the street in their 'show shoes' to try and get a taco from the truck, only to be tailed out there by the lectchy clubowner, the handsy freelance producer, or the middle-aged fan who comes to every show and always flirts while assuring her and everyone around her he's a 'harmless old man,' (or to be cat-called by some asshole who jumped off a garbage truck as she got out the club door.) This can absolutely shatter the amazing high of artistic accomplishment they were riding (which I would be allowed to hold onto in that moment,) and returns them to the role of a lone woman on the street who's got to be careful.  No one deserves to be bothered that way when they're not initiating it, but to know what these particular women can do, hell, what they just did, and to know that everyone SHOULD be bothering them at that taco truck with a pure sentiment of "I love your music, thank you for playing it, you're incredible..." God damn it.

And so, each time this happens, I have ultra-violent fantasies that exceed the limits of both what I am physically capable of and what people will go through without going to the cops.  But I know that punching and shoving and throwing down stairs would do nothing to change this old, tired situation, and would probably horrify my friend/bandmate/girlfriend in question, and most certainly be a case of me projecting a damsel in distress thing onto her that she wants no part of.  So I swallow my anger, and support my friends in whatever way they think will help.  But from now on, I am most certainly going to ask them to consider following the brave example of Amber Coffman.  Sure, there are circumstances where things seem ambiguous, and you don't want to cause someone big problems for dubious reasons.  But in situations like hers, where she was openly harassed by someone who had a reputation for that kind of behavior, I say go for it.  Out him.  Shame him.  Make him famous for it. Because consequences like those are the only way this is going to get better.

Red Velvet Cake Doesn't Taste Different Than Regular Cake

This entry is a reposting of something I had on Facebook that a) I didn't want to lose, and b) feels rather appropriate to this season of family and friends and dark and cold.  It is not particularly about music. It's about family, I suppose.  Hope you enjoy.

A trendy, false treat at my local Duane Reade.

Red Velvet cake doesn't taste that different than regular cake. What makes it red is an FDA-discouraged amount of a flavorless chemical dye. The frosting is a sweet buttercream, it has some flavor, but it's not so distinct.

My Aunt Catherine made red velvet cake, along with beautiful lemon merengue pie. The frosting was toothpaste white and sweet and sort of crackly and creamy, and the cake was moist and so deeply red, a bit darker than the color of blood. She wasn't really my Aunt, she was something like my great-Aunt's brother in-law's wife. Still, she lived down the road from my grandparents in a little house that her husband built, and after he died, we saw her anytime we were in Pennsylvania, and she came to our house for something like 7 or 8 Christmases. She always spent most of her stay with us doing housework, which she was much better at than conversation; everyone knew not to protest. She was orphaned at a young age, and grew up, I seem to recall being told, in a sanitarium for the mentally ill, where she was never taught to read or write.

I guess coming up on 10 years ago or more, her cakes and pies started tasting funny, and it was shortly thereafter determined that she had dementia; not Alzheimer's, but one of the ones that it takes forever to explain, and then you say 'It's like Alzheimer's.' I was in a lingering bratty phase, convinced that jazz vibraphone and my then-girlfriend were forever, and my family was something of a nuisance to be ridiculed and taken for granted. Aunt Catherine's confused mutterings and frightened looks and shivers were a slightly embarrassing bummer that I 'tolerated' during 'my' Christmas, mostly by avoidance, occasionally showing some compassion or understanding and then all but turning around to take a bow.

Aunt Catherine died a few years after our last Christmas with her, in a facility that probably had some things in common with the one she grew up in, although now she belonged there, I guess. I don't know if they would've made a big deal of Christmas - doubtful anyone in there would know what day it was. (Seems to me the human thing to do would just be to have Christmas every day in those places.). When we cleaned out her house to send her there, we found pictures everywhere of us, from all ages. This woman who wasn't related to me in the slightest and whom I treated as an off-putting obligation at family gatherings put me on her wall, on a side table. Proud of me? Fond of me? Perhaps just wanting something to call family; she'd never had children or even known her parents, but she knew most people had pictures of other people in their houses.

And now she's long gone, and I can't thank her for her red velvet cakes and for caring much more about me than I did about her, and Russell Stover is making this bullshit 'flavor' of seasonal treat because red velvet cake is en vogue with some combination of Yankee foodie hipsters and the human viruses who host shows about cooking fun fare for fatties on the Food Network.

Well, I say you can go to hell, Russell Stover, and I'll see you there.

I tell you who you won't find there is my Aunt Catherine.

Jazz Music Rejects Modern Comedy at its Peril

      When I first read the headline, I thought it was too good to be true, and immediately accused my friend Jordan Perlson of having discovered a magic lamp, and using his every wish to make this happen:

"H. Jon Benjamin, Who Does Not Play Piano, Recorded a Jazz Piano Album."

   I didn't know what this meant, or how far he took it, but I knew this was going to be fun for me.  H Jon Benjamin has been the star (almost always as a voiceover actor,) of countless beloved comedy shows, from the recent Archer and Bob's Burgers to the Adult Swim show Home Movies, as the talking can of vegetables hallucinated(?) by the Vietnam vet camp cook in Wet Hot American Summer, and the overconfident manchild son of Dr Katz Professional Therapist on Comedy Central in the 90s, when my love of comedy was new and burning brightly.

    Back then (in, say, 1995/96,) my favorite things to do were listen to Frank Sinatra (and Miles Davis, and Bill Evans,) and watch Conan O'Brien, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The State, and whatever good old stuff and weird/cheap original programming Comedy Central was running.  (This is when it had a lot of Kids in the Hall and Monty Python and the original British Whose Line is it Anyway?, in-between the eras when they used to show Benny Hill reruns and those sad few years when they were endlessly looping MadTV.)  Comedy and jazz were both something that most people would acknowledge were pretty great, but few people I knew were as into either as I was.

   Twenty years later, my relationship to jazz is very complex; I have two (somewhat ridiculous) degrees in performing it, and I have worked my way through the various corners of the scene (straight-ahead jazz, latin jazz, Brazilian jazz, vocal crossover jazz, electric jazz, experimental jazz, large ensemble jazz, we-hate-jazz jazz,) in what is pretty incontrovertibly the jazz capital of the world, or at least, the city in the world that has always had the most world-class jazz musicians playing the most world-class jazz in it.  (I think the title of "jazz capital of the world" should probably be reassigned to some medium-sized European city in which all of the professional jazz musicians live fairly comfortable lives, take two vacations a year, live in houses they own, play gigs where people listen, and can expect to retire for reasons that aren't medical and catastrophic.  Perhaps this is a good indication that I am about to reach the other side of thirty-five.)

At present, I have retained my deep love for the mid-1960s recordings of Wayne Shorter, the Bill Evans solo piano recordings, Benny Golson and Art Farmer's Meet the Jazztet, et al.  I still love sitting at the piano or the vibes and figuring out cool chord substitutions for a 12-bar blues.  My fascination with endlessly discussing (mostly with older and more jaded musicians) why people under 50 are not smart or virtuous enough to regularly consume and go to great lengths to understand and appreciate both classic and modern jazz has been on the wane for many years.  Lately, my appetite for discussing how lame those discussions are has faded as well.

    My appetite for comedy on the other hand, is going strong as ever, and so when I see that one of my favorite comedy stars is doing a little bit of performance art comedy that involves a subject near and dear to my heart, I'm of course excited.  Who is this going to speak to, more than me?  And it does, of course: Jon delivers his classic sort of hubristic underachiever character, sitting at the piano, looking mildly concerned at what he's gotten himself into as the rhythm section plays, and when he makes his entrance, his childish, musically incoherent contribution is hilarious, not only because it has the sound of desperation and the sort of familiar but wrong intonation of someone pretending to speak French without knowing any actual French words, but also because, as a jazz musician, I can hear moments of it that sound fairly close to some of the avant-garde jazz concerts I've been in the audience or onstage for... it's proof positive that sometimes that guy who says modern art looks like something his 3-year-old drew is not entirely wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuKJkghC2u0

Talking about what makes something funny sucks, so let's be brief; it's funny that H Jon Benjamin would book a recording session to play jazz with professional jazz musicians without knowing how to even play piano because everyone understands that playing jazz is really complex and hard and takes years and years of work.  It's funny that he acknowledges that he can't play jazz and he's doing it anyway, (a more conventional approach would be to pretend that he's really good and then the punchline is that he's terrible,) and it's all made funnier still because (on the promotional video for the album) he goes to tenor saxophone elder statesman Odean Pope for words of wisdom.  (It's not clear how much Odean knows about what he's part of, but he's not made to look foolish; he gives Jon good advice, and the fact that Jon is not in a position to implement it makes him and the concept look all the more ridiculous.)  On a zoomed-out meta level, it's funny to ME that it was probably cheaper to record and film and entire album than to do a shoot for a 10-minute comedy sketch involving a golden retriever and a backyard pool in Los Angeles, which is probably part of the reason this thing exists.  Jazz is cheap.

Now that it's been released, I expect it will draw much of the same ire from musicians, industry people, jazz writers, etc that Django Gold's New Yorker fake interview with Sonny Rollins did last year, because a) jazz apparently can't take a joke, and b) jazz cannot get far enough away from itself to realize that it is widely respected and accepted as a significant and indelible part of American culture, and therefore not vulnerable to being damaged by being used as a prop/backdrop in comedy pieces.  If Django Gold and H Jon Benjamin didn't know jazz was deserving of respect, these things wouldn't work on a conceptual level.  Furthermore, if Ken Burns Jazz (along with countless documentaries and coffee table books I was given every Christmas in my early 20s) didn't talk about jazz's heyday in New York as if it were Ghandi's non-violent protest movement or the Florentine Camerata, writing a piece where one of its most celebrated practitioners goes on the record as saying he never really liked it in the first place wouldn't be so funny.

Sonny Rollins, the satirical article about whom the jazz world decried as 'punching down,' seen here with the Secretary of State, having just received a national award for being underappreciated, forgotten and not taken seriously...

But jazz and its fans are mostly over 60 now, and that just inevitably leads to some stuffiness, even in an art form that used to be associated with New York, and heroin, and prostitutes, and political liberation movements, and the devil.  Comedy, on the other hand, is perennially relevant, and at the moment, young, dry, improv-fueled, post-ironic bearded hipster comedy is dominant; the comedians writing on the hottest shows and hosting the most popular live events and podcasts are so-called 'alt comedians,' the Onion is as popular and powerful as ever, and Marc Maron is interviewing the President of the United States for his podcast in his garage behind his Silverlake home.

So when relevant comedians with good exposure and fanbases poke fun at jazz either in articles that name many of history's greatest bandleaders or in a video that showcases a great trio of New York jazz musicians playing well, it means that our beloved art form is getting exposed to the very audience it needs to stay alive; young, smart, nerdy, obsessive consumers with a hunger to go to live shows and the income to do so.  Comedy fans.

Don't push these people away with your self-importance, jazz.  Our problem is that we're behaving like evangelical Christians here; we think we've got the greatest thing in the world, and we demand that everyone else respect it, never insult or make fun of it, and hopefully get into knowing everything about it and putting it at the center of their lives, like we did.

But jazz isn't eternal forgiveness and love and salvation.  It's confusing rhythms you can't dance to, and a 3 1/2 minute tenor saxophone solo followed by a two-minute upright bass solo where the drummer all but drops out.  And then a melody that nobody under the age of 70 has ever heard before, and then they mumble the name of it and criticize the audience for not clapping after solos.  (Or for clapping after solos.)  Then afterwards one of the people who just played music that was completely undanceable corners you to shout in your ear about how jazz started out as dance music, and was really popular 70 years ago, when apparently everyone was just much smarter and cooler than they are now.

We need to be more like buddhists.  We need to say, look, you CAN make jazz the center of your life, and listen to it for over an hour every day, and integrate its teachings into everything you do, and all your interactions with others.  But you can also just read a short book about it that sums up the basic ideas well, and try to spend some time listening to it once or twice a week, and if a really good master player comes to your town, go see him play, and see what that feels like.

Because the only way jazz has a future is if it becomes acceptable for people who support it to be kind of into it, and also to make fun of it, and not to hold it up like the mother of Christ.