Noodlings

If there is one thing you can say about me, it is this: I like a lot of music. More to the point, I like a lot of different kinds of music. There are really only two or three musical genres that I find annoying, and they are, in no particular order, Contemporary Christian music, New (aka Young) Country, and Gospel. Oh, and weenie music, but that's really cross-genre, as it occurs in rock, pop, and country, too. I like jazz, but I am afraid that when it's the kind of experimental atonal jazz noodling that goes on without any sense of direction or purpose, I get wound up. It seems so pointless.

A few years ago while living in Georgia I started to listen to a new radio station called DaveFM which played some pretty cool stuff, such as Mike Doughty, Marc Broussard and Ray LaMontagne. They played a track called 'Get Your Way' by a young fella-me-lad called Jamie Cullum, which I thought was pretty cool. It was jazzy, hip, and kinda funky. I thought Mr. Cullum was pretty fab, based on what I had heard.

Jamie has a radio show on the BBC. It's on right now. In the show, he plays jazz records. Some are good. Some even have noodling, but the good kind (Sidney Bechet, for example). But just a few minutes ago he started playing a succession of the type of free, random, pointless, wandering noodles that makes you want to ladle pureed jalapenos into your eyes. Why? I cried. Why do this to me, you creatively-ruffled-hair, untucked-shirt-with-a-tie muso? You pinstripe-and-Chuck-Taylor-shoe-wearing-pimply-faced-wannabe-bank-clerk? You, Mr. Cullum, have just lost a customer.

See, the way I see it, there's three types of jazz.

There's jazz.

There's avant-garde jazz.

And there's avant-garde-a-clue jazz.