I should probably confess right now that I’m not a jazz fan. Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of free-form prog-rock noodling and I melt every time Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert pops up on my playlist (perhaps because it’s in one of my favourite films) but as soon as I hear proper jazz-jazz — you know, scat singing, a muted trumpet or, God forbid, that awful ‘Americano’ song from the OG Ripley film — it’s a hard no.
Why? It could be the worthy intellectualism, all that IYKYK cliquishness; it could also be because, as they say in Spinal Tap, ‘Jazz is just a series of mistakes without the, “Oops.”’ I appreciate it comes in many forms and will have massively influenced much of the music I do enjoy, but drums are for bashing, not stroking with brushes.
