I love it, I love it not, I love it .....

The Koln Concert; Keith Jarrett, piano

When I was with Sam Butera at the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland in 2003, I had the opportunity to hear just a sliver of a few other acts. I stood off in the wings while the Buena Vista Social Club became electric on the stage. And I melted into a sea of Finns to hear the hardest working man in show business, Mr. James Brown.

For the two hours before Mr. Brown took over the festival, the great jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his quartet, featuring bassist John Patitucci (Isn’t that a great name?), threw down a peaceful landscape in the meadows of my soul. Which is strange, because I never really cared for Wayne Shorter’s jazz artistry. For years, I tried to make myself like him. I know he’s good, for people say that he is. But the message he carried in his saxophone notes always bypassed my house.

Until that day in Finland, where I swear he could have walked off the stage and onto the water that surrounds the city of Pori. I thought, It worked! It worked! I like Wayne Shorter! Yayy! When I got back to the States, I borrowed a buddy’s best – best, I was assured – best Wayne Shorter album, prepared to receive all the musical goods I had been denied for so many years. Well, ~sigh~ I heard that there was a message, but the conveyor belt wasn’t working.

Who can make account for fleeting tastes? Are we like Ebeneezer Scrooge, in that our momentary claim on the greatness of something new comes as the result of “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”? I suppose, more likely, it’s the superficial things, like our moods, or those transient, passing pitfalls and perils of life that throw up a “protective wall” around all that we hold dear and beautiful, that impose criteria for our personal aesthetics.

Keith Jarrett’s “The Koln Concert”, for me, personifies this unique paradigm in individualized taste. My friend, D.C., told me that, as a pianist and an improvisor, I should have this CD in my collection. So, I bought it a few days later. And when I listened to it, I thought, What kind of flotsam is this? And I put it away and didn’t listen to it for three or four months. The second time I listened to it, I thought, My God … I have never heard anything so beautiful in my life. Eight months later, I felt I deserved a treat so I reached for “Koln”, prepared to be taken to the valley of profundity and the peaks of insight. Nothing happened. The valley was empty and the peaks were enshrouded in fog.

Like it. Hate it. Like it. Hate it. I haven’t listened to the CD for years, scared that I might fall to the wrong side, the Hate side, of that razor’s edge that hovers above the sweeping perspective of great art. We all like to love. And we want to love everything. But that's not our nature.

Someday, I shall be brave and face the music of Keith Jarrett. In the meantime, I have his recording in port, ship-shape, ready to go, on my iPod.

Credits: To Charles Dickens, for being great and common - at the same time. “A Christmas Carol” may be overdone, but it packs a wallop every time. Bravo.