I am a jazz snob and proud of it. Indeed, I even agree with one of the greatest jazz snobs in the history of the art, late pianist Hank Jones (a member of the royal Jones family), that the word “jazz” does not properly capture the technical sophistication that’s required to master this art, which, as a another jazz snob, late culture critic Albert Murray, described as America’s classical music. Art Tatum is our Bach. Jazz is the sound of our civilization.
So, it’s very easy to imagine how upset I was to learn that a University of Washington oceanographer, Kate Stafford, compared the “songs” bowhead whales make to jazz because they don’t appear “to follow a clear set of rules.” My god! Has she ever really listened to jazz? It’s an art form that permits improvisation only in the context of a number of rules, one of which is essential: You must know how to play an instrument. This, I’m sad to say, can’t happen overnight. If you put a trumpet under your pillow before you sleep, there’s absolutely no chance you will wake up and blow like Miles Davis. There are no genes (black or otherwise) for jazz.
It doesn’t end there. Kate Stafford also claims that humpback “songs” are “orderly” like “[European] classical music.” I honestly think a very bad person must have locked the poor woman in some dark closet and for hours blasted nothing but the dead-end jazz of Albert Ayler or late John Coltrane. No one has ever opened the windows of her musical world to the sophistication of the Modern Jazz Quartet or the elegance of Oscar Peterson or Coltrane’s technically daunting “Giant Steps.”
Stafford has even more to say about this whale jazz business:
“The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”
When I read this, it’s impossible for me not to recall Ernest Weekley’s definition of jazz in his 1921 book, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English: “A number of niggers surrounded by noise.”
