hateful freeform jazz

I had to attend a work-related training session today, which is five hours of my life I will never get back. It was instructive in the sense where I occasionally get these impulses to apply myself more fully to the career I’ve inadvertently fallen into, and sitting in an uncomfortable chair listening to not-quite-jokes, not-quite-anecdotes about SQL and filtered data analysis for what seems like an eternity cures me of those pesky twitches of proactivity right quick.

I like my job, but it’s just not marriage material.

The training was held in the computer labs in the lower level of the library I used to work at in the mid-nineties. It’s been ages since I’ve set foot in the place, and I was shocked to find that the inter-library loan kiosk had been torn out and replaced with something called “The Jazzman Café.” Oh my fucking head.

I’m aware of libraries’ attempts to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the public in this brave new Information Age world. My librarian sister-in-law has mentioned the current trendy push toward a Borders-style coffee house/lounge model, which I personally think is absurd though I can see the appeal. For a university library, it seems rather undignified. The college library was the place I’d go to cloister myself away from the rest of campus life, and frantically bash away at an overdue script or term paper in glorious silence, free of the sickly-sweet stink of vanilla mochachino hazelnut blend that permeated every other nook and cranny of the college. Hey, why not clear out the reference room and install a skate park if we’re talking this level of focus group pandering?

Actually, the café itself didn’t irk me a much as the name, which opens a Pandora’s box of all sorts of unpleasant associations. I’m not anti-jazz; I am quite fond of Django Reinhardt, big band and swing, Dixieland, and even the übercheese of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass material. It is entirely possible to like jazz and not be a total dick, and yet jazz-holes abound, spraying noxious clouds of condescending pretentiousness from the glands hidden beneath the elbow patches of their wool blazers.

They’re almost universally white, middle-aged intelligentsia, ostensibly liberal in outlook but with a streak of Harold Bloomian cultural conservatism running just under the surface, but directed at the “dumbing down” of society than at issues of class or identity. (They tend to be very sympathetic to these from the bastions of their tony urban condos and upscale suburban mini-manses.) Jazz-holes make it a point to mention how they don’t watch TV, even when the conversation has nothing to do with television, and are quick to reference NPR. (They are easy to confuse with world music aficionados, though fans of that genre tend to be more Unitarian in outlook and jazz-holes more Pentecostal in theirs, if you catch my meaning.) They have more in common with the classical music enthusiast-type snob, though with an affected aura of hipness.

In truth, they are simply a more refined and mature iteration of those teenage white gangsta wannabees, only they prefer to haunt coffeehouses and poetry bookstores instead of the parking lot of the local Store 24 or the food court at the mall. “Yo dawg! Anglocrest Greens Eastside! This shit is dope!” or “Bop’s sense of chordal improvisation and willful abandonment of melody is nothing less than James Joyce embodied in music.” Similar beast, same shit. One could also draw parallels between jazz-holes’ puritanical attitudes towards music with those of the metalhead set, although metalheads generally don’t co-opt the “entertainment and refreshments” aspects of academic receptions, then spend the entire time hitting on cute 21 year old graduate students.

Seriously? I’d rather attend a bonfire kegger with Slicer and the Murphman. I swiped a fresh set of D-cells for the boom box and J.C. dubbed me a copy of South of Heaven. It’s on until dawn, dudes and dudettes!

Billie Holiday – Gloomy Sunday (from Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday, 2001)

Anthrax – A.I.R. (from Spreading the Disease, 1985)