Like any skill, musical talent is a combination of natural ability, self-discipline, and time. However, no amount of self-discipline and time can help if one is entirely tone deaf! For many years, I have tried to draw well, but my lack of depth perception and hand-eye coordination is the limiting factor.
No matter how many hours I spend trying to sketch, my creation would look no better than my cousin’s doodles (he’s four).Even so, I am still a decent pianist. In the world of jazz, technical skill is really not as important as a good sense of timing and a good ear. Many great jazz musicians never learned to read music and develop a high degree of mechanized technical skill. Jazz bands practiced by learning to flow with one another.There were rarely any pre-arranged musical scores to learn from; the possession of musical instruments by African-Americans was quite limited in those days, and it would have been difficult for most to get anyone to teach them how to decipher Western transcription, so most songs were touch and go.
The mysterious musical talents many African-Americans are gifted with are rooted in a musical culture where drums are used as communication and the pitch and tone of a word can change its definition.African drums served a much greater purpose than a low-tech Morse code, “but by the phonetic reproduction of the words themselves—the result being that Africans developed an extremely fine and extremely complex rhythmic sense, as well as becoming unusually responsive to timbral subtleties.”[1]African-American Life is portrayed by jazz and cannot be learned by others.Others that are not African-American if they have a passion for it can learn the art of jazz…The statement that other people cannot learn jazz music is like saying that black people are innately unable to learn classical music and Mexicans cannot learn martial arts because they do not belong to the culture that originated them.
In fact, there have been many successful white jazz musicians, Asian concert pianists, and black martial arts champions.Culture of birth has less to do with success in the arts than innate talent, the ability to unlearn a static system of thought, the embrace of novelty, and the discipline of a regular practice. As a genre, jazz was the first uniquely American music. African-Americans thought it was white dance music at first, but in the 1920’s, it was discovered to be a new form of black musical expression.
[2]Today, Latin Jazz and Fusion Jazz still enjoy a strong following. While there are many successful jazz artists of all nationalities, it is fair to say that the blues, as we know it, is definitely a black thing. The blues is a life experience, not a hobby. After all, “The blues is not something African-Americans do, but how they live.”[3] Life experience itself cannot be taught.The white, Asian, or Hispanic individual would not have the unique life experiences or cultural identification to create a brilliant blues composition.
Of course they can create a song that powerfully expresses the evil of injustice, of working hard at a thankless job until death, of losing a lover to a rival and nearly killing them both.However, it will have a feel that is unique to their culture and not fall under the umbrella of African-American style blues. While the blues can be learned at the school of hard knocks, it certainly cannot be taught.Greatness is subjective in music.There are certain objective standards of greatness that apply to jazz: a good ear for musical progression, a talent for improvisation, and a great depth of feeling to draw from.
Each musical tradition has its own standards of greatness. Every group of musical enthusiasts has a top ten list of the greatest achievers of all times. The order may change, but the names are the same. There is a certain standard the most successful musicians adhere to; it is different for every group, but it exists.Great classical music follows a certain structure while including a nearly infinite number of variations on a theme, much preparation and thought goes into the creation of such a work.
Great soul music features unforgettable voices that transport the listener to the embrace of love, the depths of despair, and forms a rapport with an audience based on shared experience, and jazz is similar in this regard.LeRoi Jones points out that proper judgment of music can only be made within the bounds of a particular cultural context, “While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time, of timbre and of vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of these elements.”[4] When speaking to many groups of jazz enthusiasts to identify the best musicians of all time, the same names always come up: Thelonius Monk, Johnny Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Miles Davis.Classical enthusiasts usually come up with Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff and Tchaichovsky when the same question is posed. Similar examples of near-universal agreement can be found in Classic Rock, R&B, and Hip Hop.
While the answers may vary, there is usually a small set of names that keep coming up. Therefore, there is some evidence that musical greatness is objective in nature. Taste, on the other hand, is purely subjective.
