All That Jazz

                                                               

            
All That Jazz    

             Jazz is such awesome background music.

 Can’t you just imagine, as I did, listening to jazz at The Kennedy Center, being in a dark, smoke-filled bar, jazz pianist playing softly in the background? A stranger enters the bar dressed in the quintessential gangster suit complete with fedora. He plucks the cigarette from his lips and taps the ashes to the floor. “Whiskey”, he tells the bartender, and taking his drink, finds a table close to the piano. Why do you think he is here? Maybe he is meeting someone, maybe he just came to listen to the music. Where is he, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Casablanca? He lights another cigarette and orders a refill, all the while watching the door and listening. The other bar patrons go about their business, not even acknowledging his presence.  His fedora sits next to him on the table, as he leans back in his chair, one hand on his drink, the other combing through his hair. The music plays on and our stranger recalls someone saying, “Music is what feelings sound like”. "A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy... all the things that humans have."(Bob Brookmeyer) 

Looking into his glass, and seeing it empty, the stranger pushes it to the center of the table and slowly gets up. He places his fedora on his head, nods to the pianist, and heads out. Who is he? Where is he going?

                                The night is dark, and rainy, headlights reflect off the puddles in the street. The year  is 1941, FDR and Churchill are contemplating what to do about Hitler and all you hear on the radio these days is doom and gloom. Perhaps our stranger merely wishes to purge his soul. Jazz does that.