Yeah you can be skilled, but that doesn't give your stuff soul. A lot of classical musicians I know who aren't going anywhere have that problem. The technique is there, they just don't feel it. Classical probably isn't for them. Or maybe they'll grow some and go somewhere. It was rude of me to imply they'll never go anywhere. It's just that they're not now.
And PE, all I can really say about jazz that is what makes it so appealing will be expressed with a few words indicative of types of jazz through the ages.
Blue notes and the blues.
Swinging notes and the feeling that is swing.
The coolness and poise of jazz.
The modernity of jazz.
The abstract-looking nature that is actually a harmonic system all its own.
That last fascinates me. When jazz was first arriving in the American music scene, it sounded like claptrap nonsense, like avant-garde you might say, to many listeners, but gradually people began to understand the system it used and learned to love it.
The whole thing revolves around blue notes. It's just so soulful dude I don't know how else to express it.
In my head I have two generalized divisions of what I think of as good jazz.
There is "cool" jazz (and I don't mean Cool Jazz), which is what it sounds like - cool, maybe uptempo, maybe down, but cool. Chilled. Poise.
Then there is soulful jazz which is a wailing kind of thing basically taken straight off of old southern black blues singers in the 1890s. That kind of playing and singing just doesn't get old for me, even if it is pretty simplistic after a while.
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Ethical Question
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