Two summers ago, I interned at a music company in their communications department. I loved it for a lot of reasons — one being the wall decor, which consisted of pictures, record covers and merchandise from the greatest musicians in modern history.
My desk sat under a Blue Note jazz poster that had covers of the most popular and influential jazz records of the past century. On days where my work was consolidated to editing documents or presentations on my computer, I would pick an album off the poster and listen to it, end-to-end. It was my first real introduction to jazz as a genre — something more than elevator music or songs you’d hear under the murmur of conversation at a Christmas party.
I moved desks, but at the end of the summer I noticed the poster had been rolled up and placed in our storage closet. I asked my manager if I could take it home, and she said yes.
That poster now hangs on my wall, and when I can’t think of anything to listen to, I turn to it and pick one of its images at random. I am never let down.
When I think back to that summer I remember the sticky humidity, the costumed characters in Times Square handing out fliers and spending my days totally obsessed with music. Most of those memories are always set to the sound of jazz that flowed from that poster — decades of a genre I’d never spent time with before.
I’ve always pride myself as someone who understands music. I like learning the history of the genres I grew up loving, studying the songwriting and composing processes of my favorite artists. I like knowing why a song functions the way it does, recognizing how artists of the past have influenced the artists we listen to today.
But it took me a long time to get around to jazz. It was harder to understand, and though I liked it in the most rudimentary forms — as the kind of music you hear in an elevator, over a TV special at Christmas time — it struck me as something undecipherable. There’s a certain embarrassment in admitting you are clueless, and with so many of the genres I didn’t grow up listening to, I was.
Living in an age of endless information, not understanding something feels like a betrayal of the technology that exists at our fingertips. There’s uncertainty to exploring anything unknown, including art and music. We’re so used to being in our element — it feels wrong to step out.
But all art comes with the predisposed expectation of misinterpretation. Surely our appreciation for a good song outweighs our understanding of the truest meaning of that song, or that film. Expertise exists for a reason — that’s why critics have always been around — but it shouldn’t exist to shame others away from exploration.
The purpose of trying something new isn’t to be an expert at it. It’s to try something new.
Freed from the pressure of being analytical we exist in our purest form: as an uninfluenced audience, looking not to criticize but to appreciate. I’ve found I almost like the experience of listening to music more when I am in uncharted territory. It’s like opening a new notebook to a set of fresh pages. What ends up in them is the world through your interpretation.
