The Voice of Jazz

The Voice of Jazz

A warm spring day with budding flowers all colors of the rainbow is the time when the voice of jazz spoke to me. I was a freshman in high school and always had an interest in music that increased with age. I devoted years and hundreds of hours to mastering the piano, voice, and violin. But when I first went to the school’s spring concert I knew where my talent could be further developed. The school concert hall was our auditorium which had a seating capacity for nine hundred music enthusiasts. At seven o’clock on a Thursday night in late May the concert began. There were the talented and the mediocre; but, everyone on the stage shared a common love of the magnificence of an instrument capable of breaking hearts or making them melt. I knew a large proportion of the musicians on stage and I knew how they talked about music. They spoke as a witness to their instrument. Because there is a lot of emotion in life to express they would say, “It’s an outlet for emotion. The feelings you can’t express with words, you can play with music.” To us, music is life, passion, talent, and victory.

At 7:15, the drums crashed and reverberated off of the walls of the auditorium, the lonely piano drifted gloomily through the night, and the bass birthed rhythm crying softly through the centuries, while the saxophone kept birthing the words. The music became a neurotic orchestra that cried and shouted and pleaded with furious history while the trumpet played and soared with the saxophone. With the onslaught of the thrashing drums, empires fell down and crashed into ruins while the saxophone sang their eulogy and sounded an ominous note. With the violins screeching disturbance, the saxophone played irresistible death, the trumpet leered, and the saxophone ran away. The saxophone spoke and birthed God and creation. The human race was born by the sounds of the tenor sax and the trumpet while the saxophone screeched, howled and birthed wars and genocide.

As the night progressed, my heart grew anxious and my stomach grew tight. All I could marvel at was the innumerable players gathered on one stage to depict battle. All of the musicians seemed to be deeply enthralled in the rhythm and beat. One instrument would begin to play and then another