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| Robert Ascroft |
NPR - Jazz great Wayne Shorter dies at 89
Thank you, Wayne Shorter, for your life, and for helping to open myself to an artform that I now consider to be one of the only things in this cold world that makes life worth living. It wasn’t until my late-thirties that I began listening to Jazz in earnest, and now at 45 I am still catching up and learning. Just cannot believe I wasted so many years before that having basically ignored this greatest of musical forms, while spending way too much with rock music. Sort of akin to being offered a juicy sirloin steak, and turning it down in favor of a fast-food cheeseburger.
Particularly when I was really young - going back to, say, my early-twenties and earlier - I settled for listening to so much mediocre rock music. Notice I said ‘mediocre’ rock; ‘butt rock’ would be another good descriptor, for I am not speaking of the good stuff that I still love and talk about such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and too many others to list here. For instance, when I was 12 years-old and they were a contemporary hit-making band, I thought Mötley Crüe were the greatest band on earth. Decades later, I’d rather listen to an entire night’s worth of cats in heat than even one minute of any of their songs, and I find their members to be repugnant human beings. I’ve grown tired of Aerosmith, AC/DC, Metallica, and Van Halen - even Guns N’ Roses to a far lesser extent - though I will say none of those bands ‘suck’ by any means (except for Aerosmith for the past thirty years.) At times in my misguided youth, I did listen to some rock music that was legitimately awful. All the hair bands when I was in elementary and middle school, various crap throughout the ‘alternative’ crazed ‘90s, and maybe a little into the 2000s. What a waste of time, and intellect. Especially intellect.
A story for another time, but I worked as the shipping and receiving director at a chain record store outlet for several years in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Certainly, I had access to most any genre available, but working in that nut house nearly killed my love of music; embracing Jazz later on helped to restore it. How much better would my life have turned out had I exposed myself to Jazz - along with a greater helping of Classical, it should be said - at a younger age? Obviously, nothing can be proven, but I have this innate sense that my world would be a different and much-improved place today had I pursued better things when it mattered most. My cognitive abilities would be greater, and I would have made wiser choices. ‘Better late than never,’ they say, but a sense of shame and even horror comes over me when I reflect on these things. For a long-time, I failed too many of the greats of this world - such as Wayne Shorter - by not paying them heed and giving them an ear. Part of me longs to go back and fix those mistakes, but then I do not believe I could actually endure having to live those incredibly painful years over again, not for any reason. At least in the here-and-now, I have acquired better tastes, and Wayne Shorter is absolutely a huge part of making that happen. A true legend, RIP.
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