Complexity Is the Bassline
A Listener's Notes on Jazz, Complicity, and Not "Getting" It
If jazz is the last refuge of the discriminating snob, then where does it leave the listener who enjoys the music, thinks about the story behind the albums, and readily admits that he doesn't "get" jazz?
I won't claim to understand jazz in any comprehensive way. I can't analyze a Coltrane solo with technical precision or trace the harmonic innovations that separate bebop from hard bop. But I enjoy listening—to the interplay between musicians, the intimate space they create, the expertise and craftsmanship on display. The soloists and leads aren't delivering riffs or slogans; they're offering expositions, telling stories in real time. And somewhere in that listening, I also hear the resistance and refusal embedded in the music, even if I can't fully articulate what that means.
I listen from the outside—aware of the distance, aware of the complicity, aware of the risks of turning someone else's tradition into my aesthetic experience. The question isn't whether that position is compromised (it is), but what to do given that compromise.
My sweet spot sits somewhere in the territory of bop, hard bop, and post-bop—music that lets me appreciate both the holistic atmosphere of a piece and zoom into individual players' contributions. Take Coltrane's "Countdown." That oscillating chromatic pattern functions as a hook, sure—it's memorable, it orients you within the form—but it's not self-contained the way a pop hook is. It's a sticky phrase in a longer conversation, a pivot point that returns but never quite the same way. It gives you something to hold onto while the real work happens in the spaces between. The song isn't just complexity for its own sake—it's a refusal of passive listening. It demands engagement.
Recently, I put on Miles Davis' Agharta, and the shift from "Countdown" felt like moving from the sharp geometric angles of 2001: A Space Odyssey into the organic, suffocating grunge of Alien. Agharta is a full-on funk jam that somehow out-Hawkinds Hawkwind—relentless, dense, almost industrial in its intensity. Michael Henderson's electric bass has this overdriven growl that wouldn't be out of place in an aggro-industrial band. It's not the cool restraint of Kind of Blue; it's heat, pressure, and endurance as method. It's the sort of uncompromising provocation that won Public Image Ltd. accolades for Metal Box, but even that boulder of post-punk radicalism pales against Davis' granite cliff of complete reinvention.
And I chuckle a bit when I realize I'm describing Black artistry through white media analogies. But that's part of the problem—or at least part of the complexity. We reach for the language we have, and that language comes with histories of its own. There's no culturally neutral metaphor available. Acknowledging this without retreating into self-flagellation might be the best we can do.
The Resistance You Can Hear (Even If You Can't Fully Know It)
To a listener in 2025, a Blue Note album from the 1960s might not immediately register as a statement of Black resistance. The music sounds too orderly, too beautifully recorded, too swinging. But that assessment reveals more about contemporary expectations of what resistance sounds like than about the music itself.
Hard bop wasn't free jazz's firebrand, but it was unapologetically Black, modern, urban, and self-possessed at a moment when mainstream America still preferred sanitized, "respectable" Black performance tailored for white audiences. That Blue Note aesthetic—tight arrangements, forward-miked drums, deep swing, modern harmonies—was a coherent announcement: We define our modernity ourselves. We set the terms of sophistication. We command the room.
That act of self-determination was resistance. The fact that Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and dozens of others were creating an alternate intellectual and emotional space—one not owned by white America—was itself a refusal. And Blue Note's recording technology, particularly Rudy Van Gelder's engineering choices, gave Black musicians control over their sonic identities. The sound wasn't just aesthetic—it was a form of authorship and self-determination, a technical sovereignty that matched the musical one.
Free jazz made that refusal explicit. Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and late-period Coltrane were saying: You still haven't heard what freedom sounds like. But that didn't make hard bop apolitical. If anything, free jazz could only be understood as rupture because hard bop had established a Black modernist world that could be ruptured.
Hard bop was sovereignty. Free jazz was dissent.
In 2025, those codes have changed. Most listeners aren't thinking about segregation-era venue politics or the fact that Blue Note was one of the few labels that allowed Black musicians to record their own compositions, choose their sidemen, and shape their sound. Instead, they hear warm analog recording, impeccable playing, mid-century modern cover design—the "cool" of it all.
Blue Note has become the Design Within Reach soundtrack—the sonic equivalent of $3,000 furniture that references working-class modernism while being completely inaccessible to actual working-class people. Take the Eames Lounge Chair: originally designed so Charles and Ray could watch Westerns in comfort while the Civil Rights movement was happening outside their California windows, now selling for $8100 to $10,000. Meanwhile, in 1966 you could buy a brand-new Blue Note LP for about four bucks (roughly $40 today) and hear Art Blakey's band absolutely eviscerate the room like they owned the air itself.
One of those things is now a status prop for people who say "I love jazz" but can't name the drummer on Moanin'. The other is still four bucks on Discogs if you're willing to live with a cover wear and crackle.
The math checks out, but the morality is a different ledger.
Meanwhile, the actual albums are still sitting there, made by people who couldn't get a hotel room in many of the cities they played.
The resistance becomes ambience. The transcendence remains.
And that transcendence is political. There's nothing apolitical about a Black tenor player taking a long chorus that centers his phrasing, his identity, his history; a rhythm section locking in without deferring to white expectations; a community of players shaping their own canon; improvisation itself as an assertion of interiority.
Even if I read it as aesthetic serenity, the music still carries the DNA of everything it meant then.
Miles Davis: A Flipbook of Sound
If hard bop was sovereignty and free jazz was dissent, Miles Davis was something else entirely: an artist who refused stasis itself.
Miles wasn't a single sound but a flipbook of many pages of sound. Each page is static and complete on its own, but the illusion of movement only works if you're willing to let each page go to see the next one.
When you listen to "So What" from Kind of Blue (1959) and then put on Agharta (1975), they might as well be from totally different artists. Understated modal exploration versus maximalist electric assault. Chamber jazz intimacy versus stadium-scale density. Cool restraint as aesthetic principle versus heat, pressure, and endurance as method. Space as elegance versus space obliterated by texture.
It's hard to think of another figure in any art form who moved that far, that successfully, while remaining uncompromising at each stage. Miles never tried to synthesize his previous selves into some cumulative statement. He didn't build bridges between eras. He turned the page.
I recently looked up his discography and realized: that cliff of radical reinvention I'd been thinking about? It's part of a whole mountain range. Plus a canyon—that five-year silence from 1975 to 1980 where he simply stopped, consumed by health issues and personal struggles, before returning with something completely different yet again.
Each era would be a career-defining achievement for most artists. Miles built multiple peaks: the Birth of the Cool nonet, the first great quintet with Coltrane, Kind of Blue and the modal revolution, the second quintet redefining acoustic post-bop, the electric transition, the full funk-rock period, and finally the 80s comeback with its pop-inflected, synth-heavy aesthetic.
I remember seeing a snippet of a 60 Minutes interview with Miles from the 80s—him croaking like Gollum, looking haggard and worn. It makes more sense now, knowing what he'd put himself through. The relentless touring, the intensity of standing in front of that electric wall of sound for hours, the substance abuse, the car accident in 1972, chronic pain, hip problems. By 1975, he wasn't just artistically exhausted—he was physically destroyed.
When he came back in 1981, he was structurally different. The voice wrecked, the body compromised, the stamina limited. Those 80s pop ballads, the cleaner production, the cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time"—I rolled my eyes when I first heard it years ago. Recently I heard it again and went, "Hmm."
Because after you've done Pangaea—after you've reached terminal velocity with maximum density and intensity—how much more radical can you get other than orbiting backwards? Not because you've lost your edge, but because that's what interests you next. Or perhaps because that's what you can physically do after everything else. And "Time After Time" is one of the most Miles things he could have done in that moment—playing a pop ballad with his horn, ignoring everyone's expectations, defining his own terms yet again.
And probably because Miles, like most jazz musicians, had to keep working. Even legendary figures don't enjoy cushy retirements. Jazz doesn't generate the passive income that rock or pop catalog ownership can produce. Medical expenses, divorce settlements, the five-year gap with no income, Columbia dropping him in 1975—all of it meant that playing festivals and covering pop songs wasn't just artistic choice. It was survival strategy for a man in his sixties with a destroyed body and bills to pay.
Global Transmission and Its Discontents
If jazz's global journey complicates our readings of its history, sometimes that complication arrives unexpectedly, in ways that feel both tender and strange.
Last year my wife and I wandered into a record shop in Helsinki and were treated to some fantastic Finnish jazz recordings. The proprietor also played us some absolutely solid Finnish dub reggae. It's almost the inversion of Cool Runnings—instead of the Jamaican bobsled team, it's a Nordic sound system.
Finnish dub doesn't sound like Kingston transplanted north. It sounds like something new: Jamaican architecture tuned for a Baltic climate. Colder reverb, cleaner harmonics, a slightly more metronomic pocket, bass that feels like a winter storm rolling across the sea. The Finnish approach is studious rather than extractive—they learn the idiom properly, respect its lineage, understand the grammar. They're not trying to "Finnish-ify" reggae into a joke. What you get is serious musicianship filtered through local sensibilities.
"Cultural appropriation?" I joked to my wife.
"Ei," she replied. "Cultural appreciation."
And that feels right—because the Finnish musicians aren't claiming reggae or dub as their invention. They're saying: This music moved us. We learned it. Now here is our response. The result is genuinely new rather than a diluted copy.
And the signal bounces into the stars with Yoko Kanno.
Kanno's unassailably adept soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop introduced "cool" jazz to a proto-digital generation through what amounts to a clean-room reconstruction—breathtaking in craft, completely sincere, and yet unmoored from the lineage. She absolutely nailed the arrangements, the voicings, the phrasing, the horn writing, the rhythm section vocabulary, the sense of compositional swagger, the emotional tone of Blue Note modernism filtered through Japanese pop eclecticism. The Seatbelts' recordings don't sound like "anime jazz"—they sound like professionals who understand Mingus, know their studio dynamics, and grasp both the physicality and humor of post-bop.
And that's the blessing and the curse.
When your first exposure to jazz is "Tank!", it's almost impossible to understand how long the tradition is, how much pain and brilliance is buried in it, how deeply the music is entwined with Black experience, how rebellion, defiance, community, and survival shaped it, how the "cool" was earned rather than adopted.
Kanno gives you the surface, but the surface is so immaculate that you can miss the depth beneath the originals. Cowboy Bebop reframes jazz as existential cool—smoke, swagger, melancholy, sad trombones over stars—rather than Black modernism. You can feel the shadow of Miles' In a Silent Way, but not the civil rights fire behind it. You feel the pulse of bebop without hearing why bebop was a coded language for intellectual agility under oppression.
Cowboy Bebop made jazz universalizable. That's beautiful—and it's also deracinating.
Kanno isn't at fault for this disconnect—she reveals it. She shows us what happens when music this powerful circulates globally: it can be studied, mastered, and reinterpreted with absolute sincerity while the historical substrate quietly erodes.
Hum the opening horn section melody of "Tank!" and your average anime fan will respond, "See you, space cowboy." Meanwhile, Lee Morgan—who basically invented that Blue Note trumpet sound—was shot dead at 33 by his common-law wife in a club, and most people have never heard his name.
Cultural survival? Never in doubt. Jazz as sonic vocabulary and aesthetic resource is permanent and indestructible—it's been globalized, hybridized, studied, sampled, reinterpreted.
The endurance of the history of its origins? That needs work.
What survives easily: the sound, the technique, the vibe, the influence. What's vanishing: why hard bop was resistance and not just style; what improvisation meant as assertion of interiority under oppression; the economic precarity that shaped musicians' lives; the segregation-era context; the specific brilliance of individual players beyond the famous few; the political weight of Black self-determination through art.
The Wobbly Road
It's a wobbly and slippery road to traverse. Ironically, the racial segregation that defined jazz also does some gatekeeping in contemporary dialog. The risk, of course, is sounding like the white guy with dreadlocks lecturing on Black resistance. But the alternative—silence as non-engagement—doesn't solve anything either.
One could attempt a discourse on the social differences between the 60s and 70s civil rights efforts—going from marches and sit-ins and Congressional acts to the ghettos and police violence a decade afterward that gets normalized as Black ambience—and get dismissed as some historical trainspotter. The music invites universal engagement (it's transcendent, it travels, it speaks across boundaries) while the context demands specific acknowledgment (this came from Black experience, resistance, survival under particular conditions).
There's no clean way to navigate that without risking: appropriative enthusiasm, performative deference, historical pedantry, or contextual erasure.
So what if, like a scientific experiment, one starts with the assumption that everything is compromised, everyone is complicit, and complicity is acknowledgment rather than shame?
Complicity, in this frame, becomes an epistemic stance rather than a moral failing.
If everything is compromised, then: there is no "pure" listening position—not for me, not for anyone in 2025. The music itself has been compromised by commercialization, decontextualization, global circulation. Even well-intentioned preservation is compromised by who funds it, who controls archives, whose stories get told. Silence is complicit (not engaging doesn't free you from the system). Engagement is complicit (your attention, dollars, interpretations all participate in ongoing dynamics of appropriation and appreciation).
The question becomes not "how do I avoid complicity?" (impossible) but "given my complicity, what do I do?"
Possible answers that aren't paralyzed by guilt: Listen honestly and acknowledge what you hear, including the resistance. Learn the history without claiming it as your story. Support living musicians and archival work materially—money, not just sentiment. Acknowledge asymmetries: Kanno's success versus Lee Morgan's death; my access versus creators' precarity. Speak when you have something to contribute, stay quiet when you don't. Accept correction without defensiveness. Don't perform virtue—just do the work.
Starting from "everything is compromised" means you can stop defending your right to engage (you're already engaged; now what?), stop performing purity (there is none), start asking better questions (What does my engagement do? Who benefits? What gets obscured? What gets preserved?), and accept discomfort without making it about your feelings.
This IS Complex
So yeah, it's not really guilt. It's something more dynamic, way more complex.
The music is transcendent and came from specific conditions of oppression. Yoko Kanno's work is brilliant homage and represents decontextualization. I can engage meaningfully and my engagement is inherently limited. Finnish dub is genuine appreciation and the economic outcomes remain asymmetric. The history needs preservation and who gets to do that work is fraught. Miles was a genius and had to tour with a destroyed body because jazz doesn't pay retirement. "Tank!" is a gateway and Lee Morgan remains unknown to most who hum it.
No clean resolutions. Just multiple things true simultaneously. Trade-offs without perfect answers. Positions that are better or worse, not right or wrong.
"Damn, this is complex" allows me to keep listening without pretending it's simple, keep learning without claiming mastery, keep engaging without demanding absolution, acknowledge what I don't know, and hold contradictions without forcing synthesis.
I don't "get" jazz. But I hear something real in it—the craft, the conversation between players, the architecture of space and silence, the refusal embedded in the music's DNA. I'm outside the context that produced it, and that limitation matters. But engaging honestly with that limitation—without retreating into comfort or performing guilt—feels more worthwhile than pretending there's some pure position available.
The music transcends because the honesty is still there. The clarity of intent. The refusal to lie or rush. The insistence on presence. In a world of algorithmic feeds and flattened affect, that directness reads as almost shockingly pure.
The joke works because jazz can withstand the joke. Its center of gravity is deeper than its contemporary signifiers.
So I keep listening. I keep learning. I keep acknowledging what I don't know and can't fully access. And I try to support the work that keeps the history alive, knowing that cultural survival and historical endurance are not the same thing—and that only one of them happens automatically.
Damn, this is complex. And that's exactly as it should be. Complexity isn't the obstacle to listening—it's the condition that makes listening worthwhile.
Postscript: No Sun Ra? Heresy!!!
Touché. I'll cue up My Brother the Wind, Parts 1 & 2 at some point, and wax poetic then.
Author's Note: Back in college a friend, Tad Preston, had turned me on to Dexter Gordon. December 4th is Tad's birthday. I put on the The Complete Blue Note Sixties Sessions this afternoon in his honor, and... this essay happened.