And All That Jazz...

Yesterday evening, I was a jazz virgin. Last night I popped that cherry by going to see my first ever live jazz gig with two of my good PhD friends. But I didn't start off paddling in the shallow end with some up tempo ragtime. No no. I jumped straight into the diving pool and tried to doggy paddle my way through experimental, progressive Scandinavian and Japanese jazz 'music'.

I should have known what was coming my way when I was given a pair of yellow earplugs at the door. Earplugs at a gig, could they be for cereal, we thought. They were super cereal as we found out...'Some people may be disturbed by the high frequencies of tonight's show' we were told...Big deal, thought I, I've served my time as a budding badass in the moshpits of death before some of the loudest, most ear-bleed inducing bands around. What could I possibly need earplugs for in quaint old Nun's Island Theatre while listening to a bit of cool jazz of a Friday evening?!

Well. I'll never again scoff at the idea of wearing earplugs at a concert when I'm told to! The opening set by The Thing sounded to me as if chaos and random had had a baby who was being slowly run over by a New York fire truck driven by bloodthirsty penguins desperate to feast on a gaggle of noisy obnoxious punk-rock swans inside the engine of a jet plane. But after the initial disorientation of not being able to find a beat, or even some related sound waves from which I could make out the ghost of a tune, I got used to it.

Then entered the japanese jazz act. Who sat at DJ decks. And who made a noise that can only be described as something the girl from The Ring would hear before the Blair Witch put her in the corner of her forest cabin to rip out her guts - via her eardrums - through the sheer force of electro-magnetic static energy. No prizes for guessing that this was where the earplugs were supposed to come in handy. But I didn't use them. What rookie rockstar would be seen dead at a concert wearing earplugs, right?! So I suffered the sounds and was happy to find that my brain hadn't turned to frothy grey liquid dripping out of all my facial emergency exits at the interval.

In the second half of the show, the Scandinavian jazzists and the Japanese jazzist joined forces to make a quartet of jazzists. They consisted of drums (with chains and gongs on top of the drum skins), double bass (played by grabbing, banging, thumping and shaking the strings), electric guitar (played with an iron file, a U-shaped ground bolt, some nails and an ordinary pick) and saxophone (which really did sound like Tommy Tiernan's donkey-who-had-eaten-a-sheet-of-ground-plastic impression). Now, I don't know whether the scar tissue that had taken the place of my eardrums since the first half had anything to do with this, but I really actually began to enjoy the second half of the show. Not only do I think I solved the Mystery of the Missing Melody, but I'm also 99% positive I caught a slight homage to rhythm at some points too. Surprisingly, I was kind of left wanting more when the whole thing was over!!!

Afterwards, I ended up in a reggae club, which was way too easy to listen to after the evening I'd had. There was nothing challenging about that experience at all! No fight between by sense of logic and order and the other part of my brain that tells me just to let go, man, be cool! One thing's for sure though, those jazz musicians last night were more hardcore than even the most satanic metal bands, and their instruments are tougher and more determined than Rocky Balboa. Last night's jazz music sounded completely accidental at first, but it was definitely all planned out skillfully I could tell by the end!

My only fear is that normal, ordinary jazz will be too easy for me now! Killer...Ya win some, ya lose some, eh!