Jazz wankers and Microsoft’s CEO

People who love jazz are wankers. We can all agree on that. Yes, and…

Of course I’ve never seen live jazz, but some things you know. And to prove it, I went to see some, prompted by two recent events.

Three songs into a dire Rod Stewart set in the summer, I resolved to focus on fresh music and forego the familiar. Only new acts and releases, or new to me. And pretty much all of jazz (a bit of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock aside) is new to me.

And I listened to a 13-part podcast on Fela Kuti, high priest of Afrobeat. The series is magnificent. It goes deep. Really deep. And it explains how a night at Fela’s club in Lagos, the Shrine, played out in the Seventies and early Eighties. Fela Kuti’s music might share something with jazz, I don’t really understand the boundaries, I just know both are unfamiliar. The night went like this:

Fela and his band start playing a pattern, a repetitive, enchanting pattern, no words, that circles and circles—people remember it as a spiral or swirl. Brian Eno calls it “a field of sound that sits there for a long time and you explore it, you kind of enter it and live in it. This is a place. This isn’t a song.”

Suddenly, after 30-40 minutes. Fela Kuti starts singing, in a gravely low-pitched voice, perhaps about the UN, Thatcher, Reagan, or the kind of history ignored by colonial schools. And “you see it sinking in, you could see ideas floating from the stage like thought balloons.”

“It’s a moment of introspection, because you realize that you haven’t been as attuned as you probably should have.”

It would start with that spiraling not-a-song space, then offer fresh ideas to open minds. But you had to give yourself to it.

The Seattle Jazz Fellowship puts on a free show every Monday. There’s a four-piece house band and a sign-up sheet for anyone who wants to have a go. Four or five strangers are called up, they huddle to agree terms—a key and song to work around—and they’re off. They play together but take turns to lead. Everyone gives and takes. Seniors and teenagers together. The night I went, some—a Prince look-a-like in a scarlet karate suit—preened; others visibly shook.

If they knew where they were going, I didn’t. No idea. I usually close my eyes at gigs at least half of the time, to help me listen more closely, find the space, but my eyes were wide open. I watched them encourage and enjoy each other, step in and ease out, change direction.

My brain was trained on 80s pop music. Very linear, quite predictable. Hello, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, good night. I’ve heard the same songs hundreds of times. This is a scan of the neural pathways a-ha’s Take On Me has laid down in my brain.

Pop brain. Megalithic cart tracks in Xemxija, Malta

And this is what my brain heard that night.

Jazz brain. Open sea.

I had no idea which way was forward and didn’t know if we were on our way somewhere or spiraling. Because I didn’t know where next, I could only be present. I had to enter their space. I had to fight the cart tracks in my brain, which were telling me these musicians didn’t know what they were doing.

Jean Cocteau explained my attitude to jazz in these terms (“excellent critic” here is a red herring, replace with “observer”).

“Let us suppose,” he said, “that our critic is an excellent critic of, say, chairs. He knows all about a good chair, how it should be constructed, how well it looks, how well it rests the human body. In fact, he gets to be a very eminent critic of chairs, an international authority. Soon, however, he forgets that he is just a good critic of chairs and prints on his visiting cards: ‘John Smith, Critic.’

“In this capacity he now examines a lamp. He looks at it all over, examines the electric fixtures, fingers the texture of the shade, considers deeply. Then he goes back to his newspaper office and writes for all the world to read:

“’The lamp of Bill Brown is not a good lamp. You cannot sit on it.’”

John Smith could become a lamp critic, but he’d have to set aside his knowledge of chairs first. To paraphrase: You can’t be a jazz wanker until you let go of being a pop tart.

My only meaningful interaction with current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ran along similar lines. He had recently moved from head of search to head of cloud, from a consumer to an enterprise business. It was just the two of us in an elevator and I asked him how the new gig was going. We talked about how you need to flush the cache—to set aside what you know from your previous world—and open your mind, become a student of your new world. You can decide later what might be useful from your old world and fold it in, but you have to surrender to the new on its own terms first.

It’s hard in a new job where you want to show your worth straight away and get some wins. But if you don’t know the direction, have no tracks to follow, you can be way off the reservation before anything makes sense.

It takes practice, a frame of mind, so, maybe find something alien and give yourself to it. You might learn different rules or just get comfortable with fewer or no rules. It might not be for you, but it could become your whole world.

I don't know who's a true jazz original and what the touchstones are, don't know if I'll enjoy those more than the fakers and facsimiles. I'll make up my own mind. Wanker’s prerogative. But if you’re already a jazz wanker, please make yourself known in the comments and suggest an artist or piece of work. I promise I’ll give it a shot.