This purports to be a brief introduction to jazz—not a dull fisting and enthusiastic prompting, like a Sears catalog, but rather, a brief exposure of at least one direction you could (can) direct the scope of your feelings. As a human being imbued with a certain amount of sensitivities (and thus needs), you perhaps need something different, something expansive, a] more subtle registration of each nuance of feeling in your life—something to reflect and fulfill the possibilities churning in your mind. Perhaps you need to listen to musicians who speak of unspeakable realization—who have taken the basic, simple thoughts and near thoughts of the profound and shaped them into melodic contours. Listening to it, you become familiar with your mind—the landscape of thoughts, not merely as a metaphor or image, but the actual ethereal landscape of thoughts, peripheral thoughts, subconscious ego, etc. You become familiar with this landscape listening to “good” jazz, listening to Shepp and Mingus, listening to Coltrane (though his bearty is so elusive—so explosive). And this metamorphosis, this profound expansion, is always unspoken. It is the music which speaks, you become the music, and words are mere conceits—extremely fragile attempts to spread the word—the feelings.

I’m not talking about all kinds of jazz, of course, only that music which shatters exterior thoughts until our meaningless suppositions about music le at our feet like so much broken glass. There’s another world of jazz, the world where the armageddon of the exterior fife is only hinted at—but even the hints are beautiful. Art Blakely and Horace Silver telling us to leave it, leave it! Here’s not only excitement, but rough drafts of the new landscape. You could find your soul in this music—in the sharp pain of Jackie McLean’s drug-heightened alto-or the free association meanderings of Ornette Coleman, who can make plastic sing. You could find your soul or lose it—no matter, the music will have breathed on the landscape of your mind; shown you the direction.