What Do You Call A Jazz Musician Without A Girlfriend?

JUZZ KIDDING

In which I examine why it took a veteran rock band’s comeback indulgence to get me to try jazz after decades spent guilelessly not trying jazz

Q: What do you call a jazz musician without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.

Oh how we laughed. Genre jokes are like the musical version of racism^[1], although they often tend to contain truisms. Jazz is indeed an esoteric and somewhat murky genre that exists on the fringes of popular culture, always vaguely tinged with cool but destined never to even flirt with, let alone attain, mainstream acceptance. “If you have to ask, you’ll never know”, legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong once famously quipped when posed the (stupid) question, “What is jazz?”, which while no doubt hella cool as an answer doesn’t really shine much light on the issue for newcomers.

Personally, jazz has always been one of those things in life the mere mention of which makes my eyes glaze over; like Shakespeare or Latin, I know it’s historically-proven to exist and is still practiced by some people to this day^[2], but it’s not something that ever seems to intersect with my life orbit in any meaningful way. Pretty much everything I know about jazz I’ve gleaned myself from;

* Jack Kerouac^[3]
* The Simpsons^[4]
* Miles Davis’ stunningly-titled autobiography Miles: The Autobiography^[5]
* The Mighty Boosh^[6]
*  Treme^[7]
* This Is Spinal Tap^[8]
* A few random episodes of Ken Burns’ documentary series Jazz^[9], or
* Sporadic jazz features in Mojo and Uncut.^[10]

Which is all well and good, but basically just highlights the fact that over my entire life the total jazz I’ve actually listened to or experienced amounts to precisely two-fifths of fuck all. I’m certainly not against it in principle – in fact all of the above glimpses have actually given me a not begrudging respect for the genre and its hepcat protagonists, stereotypes notwithstanding^[11].

Conversely, rock’n’roll – to paraphrase the great Ralph Wiggum – is where I’m a Viking, and one of my fave ever rock bands is revered ragtag Minneapolis quartet The Replacements. Their career pretty much straddled the entirety of that whacky decade we call ‘the ‘80s’, but their music has little in common with what else was happening at the time. They defiantly marched to the sound of their own drum, only that drum happened to have a wildly hedonistic and contrarian beat which kinda derailed their career or at the very least undermined any chance of meaningful commercial success^[12]. The band achieved semi-mythological infamy for their penchant for recklessness and inadvertent self-sabotage, and anyone you speak to who was lucky enough to see them a few times in their prime has a tale of seeing The Placemats (as they’re affectionately known) play a show so shambolic that it was verging on tragic. And we’re not talking about bloated rock star excess with pampered man-children indulging in clichéd extravagances because they’ve got too much time and money and not enough imagination, this is grassroots skulduggery by wildmen who took the tenets of expecting lots of sex and drugs with their rock’n’roll perhaps a tad too seriously. Sometimes they’d be so drunk that they’d play entire sets of random covers, other times they’d be too pissed to play at all, but whatever they did they did it well^[13].

Most importantly, though, despite their lack of commercial wins when they quietly pulled up stumps in 1991 they left behind them a brilliant catalogue of rock’n’roll; seven albums of heartfelt and well-crafted songs which in a perfect world would have seen The Replacements become at least as famous as bloody Good Charlotte^[14] or the hordes of other rubbish bands who somehow sell records^[15]. They did finally get nominated as inductees into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame last year, so at least that’s some small recognition.

Post break-up frontman and chief songwriter Paul Westerberg went on to carve out an excellent (although also largely unheralded) solo career and the other surviving members – drummer Chris Mars and bassist Tommy Stinson (Bob’s younger brother) – popped up from time to time in the intervening years^[16], but mainly we just had that great collection of music to remember them by. In 2006 they recorded a couple of new songs for a ‘best of’ compilation – good but not great – but it wasn’t until 2012 when an actual reunion seemed a possibility; Westerberg and Stinson hit the studio to record the Songs For Slim EP (raising funds for latter-era guitarist Slim Dunlop, who’d suffered a stroke), and then in 2013 they actually began playing shows once more in anger, debuting at Riot Fest in Toronto with a line-up that included Westerberg, Stinson, The Neighbourhoods’ frontman Dave Minehan on guitar and The Vandals’ drummer Josh Freece^[17].

From there a headlining tour of the States was announced for late-2014^[18] and rumours began to surface of new music being in the offing; Westerberg dropping cryptic (and occasionally overt) clues that a new album might eventuate and in the process stirring a potpourri of excitement amongst their fanbase (on so many levels). So imagine one’s innate confusion when told that The Replacements had finally put up something new on SoundCloud: a 25-minute free jazz improv piece called Poke Me In My Cage, apparently recorded at somewhere called Woolly Mammoth Sound in Waltham, MA. There was only one thing for it – I was going to have to break my hitherto tacit ban on all things jazz-related and get amongst it. I’m not going to lie and say that the prospect of spending nearly half an hour listening to something with the word “improv” involved didn’t scare the bejesus out of me, but I knew deep down that it was something that I had to do^[19]. I figured I’d best keep a journal lest I didn’t survive, giving investigators an insight into my untimely (and undignified) demise. Here are those notes from my experience checking out The Replacements’ Poke Me In My Cage (and my first baby steps into the world of jazz):

1 MIN: Naturally my first thoughts are all derivations of an abstract instinct that maybe I’m getting my leg pulled here. Surely they’re taking the piss?
3 MIN: I’m feverishly dividing three into 25, trying to put into percentage form exactly how much of the happening I’ve survived thus far, just like I used to do at footy training when forced to submit to long-distance runs^[20].
4 MIN: Note that the drumming is actually pretty great, albeit wanky (that’s the point I suppose). The guitars continue to be just weird.
5½ MIN: I’m thinking about the title Poke Me In My Cage and whether it’s literally meant to apply to the porcupine in the photo accompanying the track online, and if so whether this is some next level metaphor (allegory?) for the band having some sort of innate defence mechanism^[21].
1O MIN: I begin contemplating jazz in an abstract, existential context^[22], and then I start wistfully thinking about The Replacements and how great they are and why, why are they doing this to me?
13½ MIN: Over halfway; there’s light at the end of the tunnel now and I’m aware that I suddenly feel more worldly and have an increased sense of self-esteem.^[23]
16½ MIN: Someone starts yelling!^[24] My perseverance has paid off! Finally some words, something from within my musical comfort zone. I can’t really tell who it is yelling and it’s all pretty indecipherable, and after the shouting stops and my excitement subsides it all gets a bit existential again, with me questioning people’s motives for making arty, avant music amidst the maelstrom of everyday life in these confusing times we live in. I’m semi-delirious.
19½ MIN: There’s a righteous bass solo and I suddenly understand where the term ‘jazz cigarette’ comes from^[25].
21½ MIN: A sound like a kazoo being played though a Marshall stack hits hard (although sounding not nearly as cool as that description may suggest).
22 MIN: The tempo is slowing now, and I’m left busily wondering whether drugs and booze were involved in the making of this odyssey (and if so in what quantities and combinations and where can I get some)?
23 MIN: How does something like this even finish? Fade out? A triumphant chant of “Cha cha cha!”?
25 MIN: Then suddenly we’re done. It all just peters out gradually, someone says something (again indecipherable) and then there’s a drum fill (and there is a slight fade!) and then silence, blessed silence. I’ve never been so happy to hear nothing at all.

Maybe that’s the point, getting us to be more appreciative of everything that jazz isn’t? If so that’s a quite altruistic conceit all things considered. But what have I learned? I have a sneaking suspicion that Poke Me In My Cage is less about jazz^[26] than it is about The Replacements screwing around and once again not giving a fuck (although hopefully this time not to the detriment of their career). Maybe they know fools like me are hanging out for something new from them and this is a punk-esque, contrarian attempt at producing the exact opposite of whatever a ‘radio single’ is deemed to be at the moment^[27]? Fucking with people’s expectations is fun, right? Or maybe they really do love freeform jazz and this is a legitimate creative endeavour – after all, one person’s avant self-indulgence is someone else’s enlightening expressionism.

Sadly I still don’t know bugger all about jazz, except that I’d almost bet my house on the fact that, like every other genre, jazz has got its fair share of great stuff and its fair share of dross, with the bulk of it falling somewhere between those polar extremes. Some jazz folks probably swear by some acts and elements of the oeuvre, others are equally passionate about other aspects, and never the twain shall meet^[28]. I’ve survived this far without jazz in my life and it’s done just fine without my patronage, and right now I see no point in disrupting that frankly beautiful symbiosis.

And a quick note to The Replacements^[29]; for fuck’s sake, if you’re cool enough to chuck a 25-minute jazz epic out into the world then how about getting really crazy and undertaking your first trip to Australia? This time a few months ago the odds on both of those events actually happening would have been roughly the same, so why not double up? I certainly know which one would be more fun (for me at any rate). I’ll leave you with the words of the late, great Lou Reed:

“One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.”

I’ll drink to that.