Strange and Wonderful Proceedings
I remember my earliest visits to jazz clubs when I was still a teenager. Before the music started, I would say to myself, “Almost anything could happen tonight. Almost anything!” Perhaps that sounds naive, the breathless enthusing of a fan, not the sober reflections of a future critic and music historian, but I still can’t imagine approaching jazz any other way.
When I attend a classical concert, in contrast, I can tell by looking at the program exactly what I will hear. If it says Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Number 8 (the Pathétique) is on the bill that evening, I can anticipate almost every note. Rock and pop concerts are a bit more unpredictable, but even in that setting I know the band will play its familiar hits and probably try to make them sound similar to the albums, the proceedings “enhanced” with stage props and visual effects, yet still essentially the same routines they did last night in a different city and will re-create at their next tour stop.
But jazz, I learned at the very start of my exposure to it, plays by different rules. It is open to a much wider range of possibilities. The musicians themselves hardly know what they will play; the jazz world’s fixation with improvisation ensures that strange and wonderful proceedings can unfold on the bandstand, perhaps during the very next song. — Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz, pp. 202-203.