[Does Piazza feel jazz is an acquired taste?] If by 'acquired taste' you mean that jazz resists immediate enjoyment, I'm not sure I agree,.. But an active understanding of the ways in which the musicians make sense together, as opposed to a more passive way of enjoying the music, does take time to acquire, and I hope Understanding Jazz will give its readers insights that will make the music come alive for them in all its depth and excitement, which is intellectual as well as sensual, reflective as well as driving and exciting.
Tom Piazza
I lost all my income for the fall because I was supposed to be teaching at Loyola (University) and I also do regular lectures on jazz in New Orleans,.. A number of friends helped me set all this up... It's been very moving - the degree of their concern.
friends moving fall lost teaching university jazz concern income
In New Orleans, the funeral traditions are there to remind you that life goes on
life funeral traditions
I don't see how there could be any future for New Orleans without music.
music future
I want readers to come away from the new book with an appreciation both for how complex jazz is, and yet how clear its structures are,.. And I want them to come away knocked out by the brilliance and soul and wit and profundity of the performances on the CD, able to appreciate more of what went into them, and hungry to hear more, to explore this fantastic music.
music soul appreciation book readers fantastic wit hungry complex hear jazz explore profundity
It's a core element of the city's identity. It's a part of everything in New Orleans. It's not just entertainment - it's part of the way people conceive of life.
life people identity entertainment part
[Writer Tom Piazza was born on Long Island but now calls New Orleans home.] New Orleans has a personality unlike any other city,.. It has its own architecture, its own vegetation, its own smells and cuisine, and, obviously, its own music--many types of its own music. It is relaxed, and a high percentage of the population knows the value of a good meal, a good laugh, some cold beer and crawfish, and a good band. These are highly conducive to the production of good fiction, too.
architecture home music city personality fiction good laugh born population band cold beer meal
time music sense musicians understanding excitement readers reflective feel intellectual enjoyment depth alive taste jazz exciting active hope give passive driving
It's omnipresent, and it has seeped into the ground
Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.
music transcendence new-orleans
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