Jazz Music Rejects Modern Comedy at its Peril
"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.
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| 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.
