Jazz

Truly Myself: A personal essay by Will Klancnik

Every day, I would go to school at a prep school for about eight hours and learn

the lesson the teacher had planned. My education did not stop there; rather it continued

to include learning about people. The students were almost entirely white, Anglo-Saxon,

and Protestant. Having no other experience to tell me otherwise, I began to think that that

was the only type of person. After years upon years of learning this same lesson every

day, I finally learned that this is indeed not so. I have accomplished this only through my

musical tastes. I began to listen to jazz and began to learn lessons about people that I

never had but desperately needed.

On a whim, my brother had bought a best-of album of Dizzy Gillespieís works.

He kept playing it, and as a result, I became hooked on the some of his more famous

works, "A Night in Tunisia" and "Manteca." Luckily, my brother soon became annoyed

in my taking his CD, so I could play it for myself, and he forced me to buy my own copy.

In my ignorance, I bought the wrong CD. Liking this second CD as much as my

brotherís, I figured that I would enjoy other jazz CDs that much. As a result, I bought all

the jazz CDs that I could; each one branching to new musicians that I needed to

investigate. My wallet became empty fast, but I did not care; as soon as I had enough

money, I would buy a new CD. At first, I listened exclusively to Bebop. Attracted to the

freedom in the music, I began to see how the music inspired originality in the musicians.

I saw Bebop as being your self and being uninhabited, as shown by Dizzy.

Such a small taste was not enough, I was hungry for more; I listened to jazz that is

more modern than Bebop. I followed the works of a musician named Yusef Lateef. His

music has almost no originality, but he served as an easy bridge between only Bebop and

other styles, because his style follows that of the most modern style at the time. The only

originality that his music exhibits is the color; he uses meek woodwinds to play his jazz,

such as an oboe or a bamboo flute. He showed his originality through his choice of

instruments, and as a result, he improves his music.

After hearing a recording of the epic performance of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie

Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus at Massey Hall in 1953, I became

intrigued with the double bass player: Charles Mingus. At first I listened to him only for

his music, but what drew further me to him was his character. He lived his life by his

own rules that caused him to stand out from others and still maintain the respect of jazz

enthusiasts in many countries. Since Mingus, my journey through jazz has continued, but

these three musicians have influenced me the most.

These musicians are influential outside of their music; their characters taught me a

great lesson. They taught me that there are great people who do not fit into the one small

category of people that I previously believed was the only one. Dizzy is free; Mingus is

strange; Yusef is original. These people have taught me to be free, to act the way I do

because I want to and not because it looks good to someone else. I found that often times

the two are the same, but the importance is that I act with no constraints other than those

that I put on myself.