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| 12/14/2007: ""
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Last weekend in San Francisco I sat in with a jazz group at the office Christmas party, which was good fun. It's been several years since I've played much jazz in public, and some rustiness was evident. It did help that expectations were low: after all, what could the band reasonably expect from a random, unknown flute player barging onto the bandstand at an engineering company's annual Christmas bash? Could have been infinitely worse!
(As always, the flute is suspect in the jazz world, since there are so many semi-competent dabblers out there-- after all, if I were serious about this, wouldn't I be playing a &*#$@!! saxophone instead?)
The assembled corporate revelers were duly impressed, and I was asked many such questions as "How many times have you played with these guys?" Of course I'd never met the other musicians until that moment, but people unfamiliar with jazz don't really understand how it works: a shared musical vocabulary and two or three hundred tunes well-known in the jazz world enables otherwise-unacquainted players steeped in the tradition to perform together on the spot quite effectively.
The strangest and most profoundly clueless comment of the evening was a new one to me: during the first set break someone remarked, "That's the first time I've ever heard a flute substitute for a clarinet!"
I was silent for a moment, trying to figure out what in the world that meant-- or rather, what she imagined it meant. Finally, I asked:
"In what sense would you describe that as 'substituting for a clarinet?' ''
"Well, isn't a clarinet what you usually hear with that style of music?"
--Now, this woman appeared to be in her 30s or 40s, so she presumably wasn't even alive in bloody 1945, when such a sweeping statement might most recently have been somewhat valid. Gee, that was only sixty years ago, come to think of it... and the general public's comprehension of jazz will always lag by a half-century to a century or so.
I should have told her that neither Pee Wee Russell, Artie Shaw, nor Benny Goodman could make it to the gig that night and I was their emergency, last-resort replacement. Instead, I politely explained that nowadays jazz flute is actually more commonly heard than clarinet, which has been the case for quite some time. Imagine her astonishment at hearing that! --r.
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