This is in dedication to Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) and my mom’s birthday. I've been meaning to write down all my thoughts about jazz, because it’s funny how it crept into my life last winter.
This started as a little story about jazz, and turned into a musical memoir. In the spirit of jazz, I accept that this ended up somewhere different than it started. I went a little off-script, got a little bit chaotic, and maybe a little bit too intimate. This essay meanders, rambles, gets a little lost, and goes on longer than it probably should.
I hear a gentle, playful, piano opening, notes caressing the words as I begin:
My mother loves jazz. Her radio is eternally set to the local jazz station, 88.5 KNKX. Jazz permeates the air in her house, like a constant melodic fog that casts its glow over everything it touches.
Enter a little cymbal beat.
At Mom’s house, jazz forms the soundtrack to all of life: chopping onions, washing dishes, arguments, silent spells, and reconciliations. It’s all done to a jazz soundtrack. She leaves jazz playing for her cat when she leaves home.
My mother’s love for jazz is almost religious. Neither of my parents were ever actually religious, but music was always something of the sacred — of the divine — for both of them. Jazz music, in particular, has some sacred meaning to my mother.
Perhaps that has something to do with why I, until this last winter, considered myself to be an avid disliker of jazz.
Imagine eloquent, bittersweet bass plucking as my mother says:
“I wish I had the musical gene. Maybe in my next life, I’ll learn how to make music.”
It was a cold winter night in early January, but she had just put two logs into the wood-burning stove, so we were cozy at her kitchen table, a glass of wine in front of my mom, jazz playing in the background.
Mom had told me about her childhood dreams of singing and playing instruments before. I never understood her insistence that she wasn’t capable of being musically talented.
The piano jumps back in, in the bright joyful key of G major, adding spurts of energy to the flow of the words as I write:
It always seemed to me that anyone who wanted to be musical could be musical — it’s just a matter of where you spend your energy.
Quick break.
Mom doesn’t see it that way.
The beat comes back, slowly, and the piano retreats from its exalted key.
Mom believes that we are endowed with certain abilities when we enter this world. In her ontology, we inherit abilities from past lives and our ancestors, and we gift abilities we gain in this life to future lives as well as our progeny.
Mom seems satisfied with her role as a connoisseur, rather than creator, of music. She believes that her incessant witnessing of other people’s music is part of her progression towards musical ability in another life. “I wasn’t meant to make music in this life — just appreciate it,” she insists. “I’ve learned a lot by listening. Maybe I’ll play next time around.”
I was always interested in more… how shall we say… rational trains of thought than my mother. As a girl, I was obsessed with all of the sciences. I didn’t believe in a lot of the things my mom believed in.
Now the trombone comes in. it laments:
As I get older, I see more of my mother in myself. And that’s not all bad. I long ago opened up to spiritual knowledge which lives alongside intellectual knowledge in my mind. I have come to believe that my old hippy mom was always right about certain things, like the “dumbing down of America,” how consumerism ruins everything, and the need to love each other beyond political beliefs.
Last winter, I turned into my mother just a little bit more when I tuned my own radio to 88.5 KNKX, “Jazz, Blues, and NPR News.”
It all started with the conversation that cold night in January. Mom said to me, “You got the musical gene, I didn’t.”
The snare drum picks up, quickening the beat.
The way she said it was with a tone of reverence. Mom really believes that I was endowed with musical talent — which she presumes I got from both my father – who was very musical – and from my own past lives. Mom’s desire is that I not abandon that part of myself.
For Mom, understanding — really, deeply understanding — jazz music is a form of enlightenment. She doesn’t want it wasted on me.
She turned on a Louis Armstrong CD and then watched my face with anticipation as “Mack the Knife” played.
I disappointed her. Jazz just isn’t — well, wasn’t — my thing.
“But you have to listen,” she insisted.
I rolled my eyes. As if my entire life I hadn’t been forced to listen to jazz music. Jazz in the car. Jazz during dinner. Jazz, Jazz, jazz.
“Mom, I’ve heard this song a thousand times before,” I protested.
I played “Mack the Knife” in the high school jazz band. I also sang in the jazz choir. But I guarantee that I didn’t play or sing “Mack the Knife” — or any other jazz standard — well. At some other school, I probably would have never been allowed in. I could barely read music. The band teacher usually gave my solos to the guitarist. They were much better trusted with him: I hardly knew which page we were on most of the time; the guitarist ended up going to Harvard with a scholarship partly based on musical merit.
My band teacher wanted to welcome everyone who was willing to wake up and get to school at the God-awful 6:30 a.m. elective period. I showed up, and I had fun, but I wasn’t good at it. It was like a lot of things I tried on in high school: track and field, student government, pre-calculus … Partying, drinking six cups of coffee in one day, and wearing shimmering gold pants… the jazz band was a thing I tried on, but didn’t take home with me.
My mom always liked jazz. I didn’t.
Until last winter.
Mom turned the music off, but continued her soapbox; Enter, the saxophonist for their impassioned solo:
“Jazz is beautiful,” she said. “Look how Black people took white people’s instruments and made something better. Jazz is American music,” she insisted. “This is what’s awesome about this country. It’s improvisation. It’s cultures mixing up and making something new and better.”
I sat back in the chair. When my mom gets on these tangents, I’ve learned it’s better to just let her keep going and nod along. All she wanted was for me to hear her words.
“In America,” she said, “people made this new type of music. It’s the evolution of our society.”
I hadn’t ever thought about jazz as definitively American music before.
But then, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about jazz.
Bass plucking:
But that night, at Mom’s table, something in me started to shift.
I imagine the clarinet singing as I write:
The last year of my life, and winter in particular, was a time of vulnerability, and of surrender. I went through the metaphorical closet of my mind and let go of so much that had been stored there. I’m so much more whole, clear, and focused than I was a year ago. But for a while, my life felt like a mess of stuff from the closet strewn across the floor.
A year before that cold January night, I had quit my stable government job – my role in the community – to travel the world with my girlfriend. When we returned from our trip, I found myself working part time at an indy cinema, lost and aimless, revisiting all kinds of career paths I had once thought I might take. I played with re-launching the up-cycling business that I used to run and finally threw away all of the materials I had stored in the garage. I reconnected with my love for the academic path I was once on and considered going back to earn a PhD; I had to try it back on to really let it go.
At the same time, that year I was grieving the children I always imagined I would have. I was 38, so it was kind of now or never – and, the answer, it seemed, was never. The part of me that wanted nothing more than to be a mother shed tears of deep sorrow that year.
And then, my girlfriend and I broke up and I grieved the life I had with her.
This was the end of 2024. I was now also faced with a more universal form of grief, a profoundly sad, painful grief for whatever imagined or real unity I once thought existed in the United States of America. It felt like our country was ripping at the seams, just like my life in 2024.
Jazz is what’s good about America, my mom says.
I let go of so many things in 2024 by winter, 2025, it almost felt like there was nothing left. It was an all-encompassing emptiness. Not a single part of my life felt defined: not my love life, nor my professional life, nor my financial trajectory. I didn’t know whether I was going to stay where I lived in Seattle or move. I didn’t know what the next presidency was going to look like.
I was in that magical, terrifying liminal space. I was in the void.
In the void, I couldn’t see anything – it was just black.
But, in the darkness, there was still music. When all is black, music still permeates the emptiness.
“Gajumaru” by Yaima and “All is full of love” by Bjork were mantras for my broken-heart. Rachmaninoff gave shape to my melancholy. Lana Del Rey made me feel seen. She also made me feel like a beautiful straight woman who lives in LA. Residente made me feel motivated. Nirvair Pannu made me feel happy. “Wednesday morning” by Macklemore perfectly encompassed how I felt on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
My favorite workout class, Dance Church, brought me boundless joy in winter. I took a tango class, and let the sensuality of the music move through my body.
And then, I put a jazz CD into the player of my car and gave it a try. I found myself lost in its beautiful, chaotic complexity.
Maybe jazz wasn’t so bad.
Later in January, my friend begged me to go to a jazz show to cheer her up after a bad week. I wanted to protest – I don’t like jazz music – but my friend needed me, and also…maybe I did like jazz…. kind of …. a little bit ….
My head and my body moved involuntarily as the musicians took me on a journey through time and space, spattering out notes like random squiggles on a blank page.
I was into it. I had so much fun.
Jazz spoke to my state of surrender, my state of accepting the messiness of life, of needing to pick up random threads and run with them rather than following the script that I had in my head, the one where I had the partner, the job, the career path, the house, the kids, the PhD.
My ex-girlfriend is still one of my absolute favorite people, although we didn’t work as partners. One of our biggest points of contention was time. She loves to structure time like a game of tetris. I dream of time as an open, endless field that I can run freely into. She always wanted to make plans for Tuesday five weeks from now. I love Saturdays when I have nothing to do all day and I get to make it up as I go.
With my girlfriend gone, I was rediscovering myself. I was also rediscovering time.
Jazz seems to understand my craving for the eternal present moment. Jazz makes it up as it goes.
Kind of like the line in “Hannah Hunt” by Vampire weekend,
Though we live on the US dollar,
You and me,
We’ve got our own sense of time.
We had a jazz quartet play at the cinema for Film Noir Fest. I told my friend M, “I think I’m kind of starting to like jazz.”
His eyes lit up. We talked for an hour about the philosophy of jazz. M said, “You have to listen to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. Carlos Santana says he uses that album to clean the energy whenever he’s in a hotel room.”
I thought the concept of an album cleaning the energy of a space was so beautiful. I went home and cast A Love Supreme’s resonant tentacles into my living room. The next night, I did the same thing, but I took two puffs off a joint first. I laid on the couch, feeling the sensations in my toes as the music washed over me, cleansing my own energy.
I discovered the song “Rain” by Kenny Barron and played it on repeat for a day. “Baby Plays Around” by Brad Mehldau felt like a sad, cold, lonely rainy grey day in Seattle. “Into each life some rain must fall, but too much has fallen in mine,” Ella Fitzgerald sang for me.
I started listening to jazz piano, instead of classical music, while writing. At the Edge of the World by Aaron Goldberg and Going Home by Joey Calderazzo infused my writing with a different kind of energy, one that’s whittier and wilder.
In the midst of my new interest in jazz, I went to a show at a local non-profit jazz venue. A nice man took my donation for a ticket. We chatted for a minute, and he said, “We’re always looking for volunteers, if you’re interested.”
Me? Interested in volunteering at a jazz venue?
“Free shows,” he smiled at me.
Never did I think that free jazz music would be a selling point for me. But there I was, thinking it might actually be. I emailed the venue manager, and he ended up offering me an actual paid job, working as house-stage-manager and bartender.
So now I work in a jazz club.
My mother would have never supported me getting a job as a bartender – but because I would be a bartender in a jazz club, she was overjoyed.
I brought some friends to the jazz venue. That night the music was particularly off-kilter. One of my friends was into jazz. Another one didn’t particularly like jazz, she was dragged along with us. But while the music played, she texted her girlfriend, “Dude, she got me I’m into jazz. It’s so messy and cool.”
I was officially not only someone who liked jazz, but someone who introduced other people to jazz, like a pyramid scheme I never thought I’d enter.
Working in the presence of live music is beautiful. And I love that I don’t know anything about jazz, technically. I am in the Garden of Eden at a concert. I know how music makes me feel, but I wouldn’t notice a missed note or an out-of-tune instrument. I like to keep it that way. As the listener, I get to live in Rumi’s imaginary field.
By the time I was 14, I knew that I was never going to pursue a music career. I had a solid idea of what it meant to be a musician. Musicians are egotistical. They’re always performing, even when they aren’t on stage. Music as a career was a tortured, sad life. I sang in a blues band very briefly when I was 18. The older guys that I played with didn’t have the lives I wanted.
Last winter, I had a long hard reckoning about my own career path. In the absence of everything else, I found divinity. It’s all still forming in my mind, but I know that I want to build myself towards a spiritual role, maybe Buddhist chaplaincy, or maybe ministry in a Unitarian Church? Maybe I’ll get additional training in psychedelic assisted therapy, and help people die well, connected to themselves and whatever they believe to be beyond their own edges.
I started listening to the Harvard Divinity School’s podcast. They interviewed a student who – like me – was older when she went back to school for divinity. Like me, she was considering Buddhist chaplaincy. They asked her about art or music that held meaning to her. She said, “I just recently started listening to jazz. I learned that jazz is like chaplaincy, because you have to improvise.”
Jazz is like chaplaincy, I thought. Surrender and improvisation. Feeling your way through each moment.
That’s when I had the thought, WHAT IF JAZZ IS GOD?
My mother would be delighted to know that this thought popped into my brain.
But maybe music and art are mysticism. In art, as in spiritual endeavours, we seek connection to something larger, a feeling of being seen, beauty. Music is integral to spirituality in every culture. Music moves, shapes, informs. It makes us feel. Sometimes, a good song can carry the emotional burden that we can’t. Musicians are like shamans, in a sense – pulling emotions from deep within us, sometimes even putting us into altered states. Music is a form of alchemy.
Music in general, but jazz in particular, is conversational communion of humans, feeling and harmonizing with each other. When we are truly with another person, we open up to their universe, and to some amount our own universe changing. The anarchy of that is kind of scary. But it’s also sublime. It’s seeing the divine in each other — it’s recognizing that who we are can be permeable, that we are connected to something more than ourselves.
I always found transcendence in music. When I was young, Dad told me, “You can feel words and you can also feel music. You shouldn’t stop writing.”
Dad said, “You and your sister are both so fucking smart.”
“She’s smarter than me,” I said. My sister understands musical theory in a mathematical way that I’ll never be able to comprehend. She went to Saturday school at Juilliard as a teenager. In New York State music exams, she was in the top 1%. She got accepted to some of the top music schools in the country, with a full scholarship on offer. But, she decided to bail on music and go to a liberal arts college instead. She had tried on enough of the classical musical career path to understand that if she was going to succeed in music, she would have to really want it.
“She’s smart in one way, but you’re smart in another way,” Dad said. “ She can calculate in her head quicker than anyone and see all the patterns. But you know how to feel things intuitively.”
Dad said again, “You guys are both so fucking smart it kills me.”
For all his faults as a parent — of which there were many — my dad had a genuine adoration for his children (including my older sister, who he adopted as his own). He got excited about whatever we were excited about. When I was into physics at 12 years old, he found public lectures at the University of Washington for me to watch, and gave me a copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
Dad didn’t help in many practical ways, and messed me up pretty well by becoming an addict, selling all the furniture in the house for drugs, stealing from me, and going missing for several years. But, on the positive side, he wasn’t a dream killer. When I was a little kid, he made me feel like I could do anything I wanted to do.
Dad was a musician. My mom met him at a nuclear protest benefit concert — she was dancing in the crowd, and he was playing harmonica in the band. My conception was quite musical: at a Grateful Dead concert, in the back of a 1956 Chevy that had been converted to a caravan.
Around the time they got pregnant with me, Dad was invited to tour with Eric Clapton. He didn’t take the opportunity. Mom said it’s because he was scared. Dad said it was because he was trying to stay away from drugs — which is funny, since years later he ended up consumed by drugs anyways.
Mom wanted to move to Alaska and open a spiritual bookstore. She was eight months pregnant with me, which seems like an insane time to pack your life up and drive north to a place you’ve never been. But, mom says “Your soul told me that you needed to be raised where there was more nature and things were less intense.”
The eighty-year old Yugoslavian lady furrier she had been working for in San Luis Obispo gave her some contacts in Alaska. They ended up stopping in Washington State where they found a house for rent.
Mom played classical music to me in the womb. She said she knew that would make me more intelligent.
My mom told me Dad was nervous as hell the day I was born, and she had to send him with my older sister to get a happy meal to distract him from his nerves. Dad once told me that the week I was born, he listened to the album Pirates by Ricky Lee Jones. I’m not really sure why, but that seemed like an important memory for him. Dad hung out with Ricky Lee Jones at some point in his life, although the details of the story are hazy.
Pirates is one of my all time favorite albums. Maybe it’s familiar to me in a primordial way because they listened to it while I was still in the womb. I didn’t know that Ricky Lee Jones is considered a jazz musician, until recently.
Jazz, I am learning, isn’t something that can be totally defined or confined. Jazz can be many different things. Maybe jazz can be whatever you want it to be?
I don’t remember my parents being together, but they remained friends throughout my childhood. A huge part of their friendship continued to be music. Dad made Mom mix tapes that she’d play in the Honda Civic on road trips.
Dad wanted to teach me everything he knew about music. But, he supported whatever I was into. I was into Star Trek when I was in third grade, so he surprised me with a trip to a local hotel for a Star Trek convention. William Shatner was there to give the keynote speech. Someone asked Mr. Shatner what his proudest moment was.
Dad shouted from the back of the crowd, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds!” *(For context, William Shatner made a cover of the Beatles song that is generally regarded as terrible.) My dad knew far more about the Beatles than he did about Star Trek.
William Shatner — Captain Kirk himself — spoke directly to my dad from the stage. He laughed, and said “Yes, the man in the red flannel shirt is right.” I still remember exactly what color that flannel shirt was that Dad was wearing, because William Shatner referred to it.
When I was 11, I moved in with Dad. He said he didn’t care if I was vegetarian but I had to cook for myself because he liked eating meat. Even though he loved meat, he found weird vegan places to take me. Dad was good at finding weird restaurants, hole-in-the-wall places with grease-stained walls that would either be amazing or give you food poisoning. There was a new place in town that served Cajun food and sometimes had live music. Dad wanted me to hear the music there.
Dad was really excited that I wanted to take piano and voice lessons. There was an old piano in the living room I used to play for hours. I learned to play “In the Arms of an Angel” by Sarah McLachlan while I watched Dad spiral into his path of addiction.
There were certain artists Dad wanted me to understand: Tom Waits, Keb’ Mo’, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Roy Orbison, Nina Simone, Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana. Seeing The Rolling Stones was a requirement to my upbringing – Dad bought us front row seats. It was an amazing show.
Mom’s all time favorite annual event was the Taj Mahal concert at the zoo lawn in Seattle. Dad bought tickets for Mom and I to the Pretenders with Neil Young together for our birthdays one year. My mom loved Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Ry Cooder. She always loved blues. Blues, and jazz. It seems that as the years went on and my mom got older, she listened to more jazz and less of everything else.
One of my good friends used to come over and play guitar and I would sing for hours in the living room. “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, “Badfish” by Sublime, I can’t hear those songs and not go back to that time and place. Roman lived with us for a while because of family problems — this was when Dad was only a little messed up on drugs, before he got really messed up on drugs and I went to live with another friend’s family for the same reason. Dad thought that Roman and I should get together. Mostly, it seemed, because Roman and I sounded good making music together. I didn’t see Roman like that — and he didn’t see me like that either. I had a crush on a girl at my school. I finally told Dad, “I think I like girls. I think I’m bisexual.”
Dad laughed. “Well, yeah, women are the better sex. Same rules still apply as for guys: If they try to fuck with you I’ll buy a shot gun.”
Now, the music is coming back in my head. It’s melancholy piano, playing alone and lonely in a minor key as I write:
Unfortunately, rather than protecting me from heartbreak, Dad broke my heart. He couldn’t run away from his own mental health issues, his own childhood trauma. He couldn’t cope with his divorce with my step-mom. He couldn’t cope as a parent. He journeyed into alcohol, and then drugs, and then a period of homelessness. For years, I had no idea where he was, and whether he was dead or alive.
It seems like my parents gave me all I needed to understand the blues: step-parents coming and going, drugs, alcohol, emotional immaturity, fights, and a piano to commiserate with. My mom found solace to her human experience in jazz. For better or worse, the childhood my parents gave me was improvised, chaotic, tumultuous, open-minded, free … the childhood they gave me was very jazz.
When I was 18, I didn’t have time for jazz. Like any good teenager, I wanted as far away from the things that I was raised with as possible. In my case, teenage rebellion and twenty-something reflection was crucial. I was terrified that I would end up like my dad. I spent most of my twenties in various modalities of healing and processing. The journey continues.
My sister had a more practical way of seeing things: “As long as I don’t smoke crack, I’m probably going to be OK,” she said.
But, I have always seen my father in myself. I’ve always seen his lineage in me; his father, who was a prolific actor and theater teacher; his great aunt who was an incredibly famous dancer and also influential in the Russian revolution; his sister, who was also a dancer until a beam fell on her back during an earthquake; his mother, who was eccentric as hell; his uncle who had multiple PhDs; his brother, who was creative and schizophrenic.
When Dad died, the inheritance my sisters and I shared was $11 in a Wells Fargo bank account, fifty-something harmonicas, an antique rocking horse, and a massive collection of records. I somehow resented all of those records. We sold several of them to help pay for Dad’s cremation — what else were we going to do, hold onto the memories of when he was alive, when he would have something to say about each song as it came onto the stereo?
But recently, I’ve been thinking differently about Dad, and about music. Music has always been there, holding space for me, in every season of life. I found salsa music as a teenager, and found a boyfriend through salsa dancing, and learned to love my body in dance. Damien Rice spoke to my soul when I was 21, living in Dublin, dreaming of a future, unwinding the past. In grad school, Bollywood night at one of the clubs always made me happier, no matter what kind of a week I had. Xavier Rudd’s “Follow the Sun” made me feel peaceful and hopeful when I was 27, terribly sick, diagnosed with a chronic illness.
Last winter, jazz gave texture to my season of surrender.
I had this idea that Dad going on a bad path had something to do with his musical nature. But what if I had that all backwards – what if music was his solace, not his demon? If music speaks to the pain, the joy, the grief, the rage, then it’s something of the healing. Maybe the creative genius in my lineage was an answer to the pain, not the source of it.
Maybe music is divinity.
I like jazz music now. It’s part of my musical menagerie now. I like how jazz expands my mind, and challenges my sense of order.
Maybe jazz is God, in the sense that we are all here in this messy, chaotic world, together, figuring it all out as we go, together. If music is divine, and jazz is a divine, unscripted, conversational connection, it’s the divinity in each other.
I like jazz now. I also like myself, my parents, and my own origin story, a little bit more than I did last winter.
