I had a high school teacher who loaned me his copy of John Coltrane’s free jazz blowout Ascension, and it was exciting to discover that I could piss off my parents with a recording of unamplified instruments as easily, maybe even more easily, than I could with the first side of Led Zeppelin II or the title track of John Cale’s Fear. I got into jazz for the same reason every other white male in America in the 1960s got into jazz: so I could look like a beatnik. I’ve been up to it for so long I can’t even tell the difference anymore. This shit takes work, whether you’re pulling the long con or not. So you’d think Billy Bob, or as I’m going to call him from now on out of spite, William Robert, would know better. If there’s ever a record that people get accused of just pretending to like so they look cool, it’s Trout Mask Replica. The statement comes from a guy who, when I hung out with him, owned five discrete physical copies of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, a record highly informed by jazz, and not the easy kind.
Remember when a bunch of us got really cranky about that Buzzfeed “What’s the deal with jazz?” thing? (Yeah, no, I’m not gonna link to it.) Then just a couple of weeks ago on the Twitter a high-profile profile writer recounted how Billy Bob Thornton once told her that jazz was a long con and that anyone who said they liked it was just doing a long con themselves.
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