The zz of jazz

It was, Ambassador Francis Ricciardone said, not a major foreign policy affair, just a time to have some fun.

And it was, finger-snappin’ and toe-tappin’ fun as over a hundred guests filled the Chick Parsons Hall at the U.S. Embassy to listen to the Chicago Jazz Quartet, one of eight ensembles of jazz musicians chosen to represent the U.S. as jazz ambassadors in performances around the world. Matt Lewis, Benjamin Lewis, Lorin Cohen and Michael Raynor went from Smokey Robinson (You Are the Sunshine of My Life) to Cole Porter (Just One of Those Things), from Charlie Chaplin (who wrote the melody for the classic Smile) to George Gershwin (Summertime), plus Sergio Mendez and Duke Ellington and the Louie Armstrong hit known around the world, What a Wonderful World.

Jazz is touted as the indigenous American art form, begun over a hundred years ago when African-American musicians in New Orleans (N’awlins, I was taught to say, never New Orleens) mixed ragtime with the instruments of the brass band and the "emotional power of blues singing" and came up with jazz. Just like a lot of things American, jazz is about singing how you feel, making the music your own, nevermind the rules of composition and tempo and structure. Aside from improvisation, which makes jazz different each time it’s played, an integral part of the art has been scatting, described as "a kind of vocal improvisation that uses nonsense syllables like bop shoo bop, diddly dah be doo be to imitate instrumental improvisations". What it means, bottom line, is a vocalist having fun–with the music, with the guys he’s playing or jamming with, with the audience.

Today, jazz has taken root all over the U.S. and in countries like France, though I must say it is still in the streets and parks and bars of New Orleans that one gets a real feel of jazz. But the bar scene in Chicago has become a hotbed of jazz, and from there comes this quartet who–pardon the stereotyping–look more like graduate students or yuppie lawyers and investment bankers than jazz musicians.

They’ve been very busy ambassadors, teaching a master class, jamming at Merck’s Bar in Greenbelt, playing the concert at the embassy and another one at the Shangri-La Plaza then flying off to Cebu for more engagements, forging, as they go along, coalitions of very willing and appreciative music enthusiasts.