Some time ago, I published an article about my experience of joining a college jazz club with high expectations, only to leave after one year because I became tired of what sounded to me less like improvisation and more like unstructured playing.
That article received more views than I expected. However, when I reread it, I felt that it contained more of my personal impressions than a simple record of events. So this time, I would like to rewrite the experience in a more factual and reflective way.
Why I Joined the Jazz Club
In high school, I played in a wind ensemble. When I entered university, I wanted to play jazz more seriously.The jazz club at my university did not have a big band at the time. Instead, students formed small combos on their own. That seemed convenient to me because I would not be strictly tied to a fixed instrument role. It also gave me a reason to buy an alto saxophone after being introduced to one by a teacher.
My First Impressions After Joining
When I first joined, the club was playing Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.” However, to my ears, it sounded as if the chord progression was being played incorrectly.I also felt that many people were improvising without much knowledge of chords. Still, within that space, there seemed to be an atmosphere where this was accepted as “what improvisation is.”
It felt as if there was a kind of local correctness that existed only within that room.
A Preachy Atmosphere
There was a senior member who often said, “That is not jazz.”He told me that jazz from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as fusion, was wrong and should not be listened to.
At one point, he asked me what kind of musician I wanted to become. At that time, I was listening to Kenny G because his music gave me a sense of comfort. I said that I wanted to become “like Kenny G,” not in the sense of copying his exact performance style, but in the sense that I wanted to make music that felt comforting to listen to.
He responded by saying that I would never improve if I thought that way.
There was also a time when a classmate told me, “Music is written with the characters for ‘enjoying sound.’” Looking back, the phrase itself may not be wrong. But at the time, it felt as if I was being lectured simply because I had doubts about the situation.
Returning to Wind Ensemble and Questioning Myself
After that, I thought that perhaps wind ensemble music, where I could perform based on written scores, might suit me better. So I joined a local wind ensemble.However, while playing there, I gradually began to ask myself whether this was really what I had wanted to do.
Eventually, I started to focus more seriously on composing solo piano pieces, because that was something I could complete on my own.
Similar Atmospheres That Still Seem to Remain Today
When I look at social media today, I sometimes still see people defining anything outside their ideal image of jazz as “fake jazz,” drawing strong lines between what is supposedly correct and incorrect.I also sometimes hear DTM tracks online where the chords and scales seem to clash in an unintentional way. When I hear such music, I am reminded of the unstructured playing I encountered in college, even though it was called improvisation.
Of course, I do not think today’s jazz clubs or music production scenes are exactly the same as what I experienced back then. Still, I sometimes feel that certain aspects have remained, even if their form has changed.
For me, my experience in the college jazz club was not simply a matter of “jazz not being right for me.”
It became an important event that made me think about what kind of music I wanted to create, and what kinds of environments I should keep some distance from.