I've Started Listening to Jazz

I've started listening to jazz at work and at home, which is unusual for me because I've strongly disliked the genre since I took a jazz appreciation course for my very first teaching license renewal in Alaska.  Friends in high school and college occasionally performed jazz pieces, which I only appreciated because my friends were talented and enjoyed them and because for whatever reason Julie Andrews' performance of "Le Jazz Hot" in Victor/Victoria didn't really count in my mind. As for that "appreciation" course, I b-a-r-e-l-y passed it, with my licensure and my ability to continue to feed my children as a single mother hanging in the balance. Those were my Windham Hill, 80s pop and rock anthems, and the soundtracks for The Last of the Mohicans, Stargate, and Little Women on loop days. I was even known to listen and dance to bar bands covering Garth Brooks and Brooks and Dunn.  But jazz? No level of musical YUCK could come close to how it made me feel. Headache-inducing chaos being passed off as "music" was something I never anticipated enjoying. For twenty-five years, I was right.

Then my fifties arrived along with a global pandemic and societal upheaval that began to cruise down my neighborhood streets and across my television screen in larger-than-life, high-definition clarity. Add some significant health issues and the deaths of several close to me, a diagnosis of anxiety, my decision to leave the classroom in order to revive our school library, and my inability to prevent myself from absorbing some of the dismay experienced by those around me, and you'll likely suggest it was only logical for my ears, mind, and heart to drift toward jazz now that I'm older.

I don't like fast-paced, noisy, nearly incoherent music, so something more along the lines of Take Five by Dave Brubeck sits at the extreme of my daytime productivity playlist while Miles Davis' Blue in Green is the perfect background for reading. The "Cool Jazz" playlist on Amazon has had students asking me what I'm listening to when they visit the library at the end of the day to quickly return and swap out books. 

"Is that jazz, Mrs. Sommerville?"  Yes, yes it is.