JAZZ KILLS

So after less than a week in a band I’m not in a band any more.

Jazz got me again, just like in the 11th grade when my music friends, guys who I had known since elementary school, turned into jazz snobs and didn’t want to play fun stuff together any more.  Today (and Wednesday, when I was crying in the bathroom) I knew I was in trouble when the other guitarist wanted to play jazz standards and hear me improvise over a 12 chord blues that he was playing with the jazziest of jazzy altered chords.  I hate blues.  I haven’t soloed over a 12 chord blues since I was 16 or 17 because as far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to unless someone is making you do it.  I didn’t think that this band, which I have seen play live, was a straight up jazz band since out of the eight or nine songs I’ve heard them do only two sounded restless, dissonant, and hypercomplex.  The rest of the songs are pop/rock I can play easily.  It turns out they really are a jazz band, if not completely in music than in ideology.  That means that my competent rhythm guitar and bass and pretty good lyric writing skills aren’t enough.

I don’t swing.  I groove feebly.  I failed the virtuoso test I didn’t know I was taking.  I played a straight minor chord when I should have played a Ebm7+9.  I am innately not a jazzist.

It hurts like a breakup.  I feel humiliated even though the “this isn’t working” conversation happened in the calmest, most respectful way possible.  I took myself out for vegan Japanese food to cure my broken heart with miso soup.  I cried a little more in the restaurant bathroom.  The lucky cat watched me from the back of the toilet.  I hope it’s the last bathroom I cry in for a while.

But like a breakup this also means I’m free to do whatever I want.  Like not try to scramble songs I’ve already written to make them fit the band I’m not playing with any more or scramble my brain learning dissonant, 100% 16th note bass runs.   Like start my own band (East Bay music-making ladies, where are you?)  Also to crawl around Craigslist at 2 am fantasizing about finding women to make music with but finding dude after dude who RAWKS.