Jazz Up Your Life!

i just attended Java Jazz Festival in my town. yeah, it's one of an annual Jazz Festival which held in my town. the fun to attend this festival is there's hundred musician who perform in this festival and there are like around twenty stages all around the Jakarta Convention Centre.

it's not my first time to attend this event, but somehow i think about something during one of the performances.

i think, life is like jazz.

haha wait! let me finish it...

yeah, our life is like jazz...
ok, at least, my life is like jazz...
and we should keep it jazzy.
why?



well, jazz is the genre music with a lot of improvisation in it. the composer just give the pattern what it should be, and after that he/she will give the musicians such a freedom to play the composition. i think the composer just give some notation how the song will begins, the bridge, the refrain, and how it ends. the rest of it, every instrument who play will do their improvisation, depends on what they feel at the time while the rest of the instrument will support with their low tone.

i don't know why but it seems that every jazz musicians who perform in a stage, they will perform in total, all out. they will give all of their best to the top. they will rolling down with their saxophone, they will jumping around the stage, they will shouting, they will sweating out. i think they do that because they feel the music. they take the melody and put it inside their blood. they feel it, they breath with it. one time, on Ron King Quartet performance, Ron King himself told the audience to not make some noise so the performers can do their best. wowh? they need the perfect situation to perform!

as far as i know, there are several Jazz musicians who always do the different arrangement of their songs in every performances. so for the audience, they will not bored with the song that the performers perform. i do give a lot of appreciation to these kind of musicians. because they always totally prepare in every performance. and they proved that they very creative in their music. they know the title of the song is same, the lyrics are the same, the meaning is the same. but the audience is never the same, neither the stages, the instuments they used, the additional players, the featured artists, and so on.

but hey, sh*t happens isn't?
yes, on Java Jazz Festival 2009 which i attended, i notice there were something wrong with the saxophone on Soil & "Pimp" Sessions performance. it seems like the saxophone is broken or something like that, with the backstage crew running to the musician bringing flashlight and looks like checking something. BUT, the band didn't wait for the saxophone. of course they can't play the next song because they need the saxophone to fill in on their music. instead of playing the next song, the band invite the audience to shout and make some tones, helped by the other instruments.
this act is like to cover up the saxophone's break down and it's so cool. they do IMPROVISE because they absolutely don't know that the saxophone will break down. but they act in the stage like nothing happens and i'm sure some of the audience didn't know that there's something wrong with the saxophone.

so i think, life is like the stage of jazz performance and we are the player in it.

:D