Jazz to a Jailbird

A piece of a letter to someone in jail:

Maybe you will like that John Coltrane album when you get out. There’s some sort of endorphic thrill that jazz can trigger, and it has to do with understanding on some level the trip that the guy is going on when he plays. It’s like riding an intellectual roller coaster, only the emotional responses are a bit more refined than the urge to scream or wet your pants – but they’re not that different. There can be moans here and there, and fluids can leak from the body. Being a musician myself, I can follow a jazz improvisation and appreciate all the work behind his ability to do what he does, but the emotional component – I’m a sucker for it. I think jazz musicians are almost all geniuses. But not everybody will respond to jazz; it’s seeks something in a person and seldom finds it. What that thing is, well, it’s hard to describe.

Great that you can get NPR, and that game show based on news events is really, really hilarious like you say. Those guys are just plain smart as shit. And sorry about the format change on your rock station. All of that format stuff is the result of market research, which serves only to homogonize everything, which flattens the landscape of interesting people by stopping the developement of idiosyncratic tastes in those lacking strong individualism, stopping it while it’s being born.

Not your problem.