I love how jazz refers to a set of chord sequences as ‘changes’ and the art of navigating these changes as an ‘improvisation’.
Is this not perhaps what life is about? Being presented with new situations and constantly looking at interesting ways of responding to change, thus in a constant improvisatory mode.
If this is the case maybe, then there is something to learn from the jazzmen and women around us in terms of how they prepare/not prepare their responses to the changes.
Nduduzo Makhathini
What is your thought?
Navigating changes and creating a new experience birthed jazz. They say, from 1619 to well into the 1800s, slaves were brought to the Americas from Africa where music played a functional (not artistic) role: work songs, spiritual songs, healing songs, fertility songs, etc. While those involved in the slave trade strived to strip everything away from their victims (freedom, names, possessions, family members, etc.), they, for the most part, allowed them to keep their music out of the belief that "a singing slave, was a happy slave" and, therefore, would be less likely to cause an uprising.
