Adapt and communicate through music

The Zaragoza Auditorium celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Jazz Festival in November 2023. We visited this city just a few days before this wonderful edition of the Jazz Festival was held.

Wrong timing.

We have seen the advertisements for the festival but we haven't been able to see any of the concerts. Leaving the park where we were walking one morning, the billboards were there, showing me an exquisite experience that the city already lived in the previous years and the announcements for the current edition. What a shame, not being able to hear live some of the gems of this genre of music.

I know that playing jazz is not easy. It is not easy to play classical music either if we talk about difficulties. Each one has its different ways of expressing the same essence - music that captures us and takes us to a world where the imagination opens through sound. Mine is, you know, classical music, and I can't brag about any skills that would take me to the field of jazz music.

I know, you would say that everything can be learned. True. You are born with some skills, yes, but if you don't work and develop them you won't get anywhere. The seed develops depending on the conditions in which it finds itself - nutrients, water, sun, and not least the person who tills the land. That is ourselves with the interests we have and the work we undertake. Learn, grow, adapt.

I chose to adapt when I had some direct contact with jazz music instead of learning it. There was no interest on my side and time either. I got to work with one jazz singer and all we could do in a short time was to adapt, both of us.

At first, I was nervous as we didn't know each other and we had to prepare a good repertoire in a really short time. A few rehearsals to choose the songs, go through them, plan well the things we can do together and avoid the things we can't play together. As I said, it was more to adapt our skills to the new circumstance and make a fusion. Obviously, I could not become a jazz pianist (or anything close to it) in one week and she would not change her way of singing. We just accommodated our capabilities.

After all, it was fun to work together and our collaboration brought good moments and some learnings. She was older than me and had many years of experience on stage as a performer. Her parents and siblings were also artists so she perfectly knew what was the key to a good performance. Work a lot, prepare the repertoire to impeccability and adapt to the moment when it is needed. Her father used to say that whatever you do (sing, play an instrument, dance...) you have to perform it a hundred times at home already without any mistakes - just then it will be good enough to present it to the audience. There is truth in that though it is then reaching the fields of perfection.

Back to Zaragoza and this Jazz Festival. One of the posters and names that caught my attention was Emmet Cohen. Nice hair of that young man, a cool outfit and a pretty Yamaha piano. I checked his name out at home, as we were not in the city the day he had the concert.

Wow, that was a thing to hear. Someone who is not familiar with jazz music would find himself lost in all those chords, jazz scales, and rhythm and probably think it is all just random playing.

It is not :D

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Still, the only thing I can do is stay amazed in front of a musician like this young American pianist Emmet Cohen and enjoy the perfection he is capable of doing. Here I leave a video of a set recorded in Warsaw, but there are other interesting stuff to listen to on his YouTube channel. For example, a series called "Live from Emmet's Place" (those weekly live streaming were established during the pandemic).

There is a question that I have always had in my mind while watching a jazz session - the connection between jazz musicians and the spontaneous musical dialogue they are able to perform. Is that accidental then?

No doubt, good communication needs an understanding of the common language, in its case musical language, with a special dialect - jazz.