There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.
Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.
I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.
If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.
I do find modern jazz quite tricky.
Jazz sometimes can be really complicated and inaccessible to people because they don't know what to start with. You can start with something that you love, but if you start with something that you hate, then it's like, 'You know what, I hate jazz.' It took me a lot of time to catch on to jazz, too.
There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.
It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.
