If you talk to people who don’t like jazz and ask them why, you often get the answer: “The improvisations are always too long!” Interestingly, then, what they object to is not the harmonic or rhythmic tension or the complexity of the music, but its formal shape, the way it unfolds in time. So the difficulty many people have in listening to jazz does not lie in failing to understand the music on an intellectual level, but in a different way of experiencing events in time. Reason enough to think about this a little more closely.
Because European classical music is notated and fixed in writing, it has developed a strong interest in musical form. Composers devoted a great part of their creative energy to making the formal course of their pieces interesting. Over time, dramatic, goal-directed musical forms developed, such as sonata form, the symphony and opera, which have fundamentally shaped the way European listeners experience music. You could call this a dramatic sense of time.
In a mostly flattened and trivialised form, Schlager and pop music also correspond to this way of experiencing music. Here too the songs consist of several sections, and they have a simple arc of tension that holds them together for three minutes.
In jazz, by contrast, the course of the music is left to the flow of improvisation. The simple order of a piece (theme, sequence of solos, closing theme) is really of more practical than artistic significance; it neither aims nor is able to be interesting to the listener. What holds a piece together are quite different things, less closely tied to the passing of time: the individual sound of the musicians; the fine-tuning of the time feel within the band; the energy that arises from playing together. Every moment of an improvisation thus becomes equally important. Given these basic conditions, an improvised jazz piece can grow very long without any strong formal break. Of course an improvisation also has developments, the building up and releasing of tension, or motifs that are used for a while. But none of this is subject to a goal-directed plan in time; at every moment it is justified in its own right. You could say that jazz has an epic sense of time.
A listener who is used to music with a dramatic sense of time, and who expects artistically shaped music above all to have a complex course, will therefore be disappointed by a jazz improvisation. That is, of course, in the first place not the improviser’s problem but the listener’s. But since the relationship between musicians and listeners plays a special part in jazz (see also “Jazz Musicians and Their Audience”), it seems important to me to recognise the reasons for this disappointment. Only then can one make clear that the epic, flowing experience of time, and the long durations too, belong to the essence of jazz. And one can point to the qualities of jazz that are really fundamental and that create coherence: the sound, the individual timing and the improvised interplay within the band.