Donald Miller begins his memoir Blue Like Jazz with an “Author’s Note” that reads, in part,
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I never really liked dance until I watched my daughter dance rapturously. Any type of music will get her moving, including the pre-programmed light jazz numbers saved in the memory of the small digital piano we bought a few years ago. She shows me the new steps she has to learn in her new jazz dance class, explaining that she’s doing them very carefully now but will eventually have to get them much faster.
Then she begins improvising, a mix of the ballet and jazz she’s learned mixed with some of the Polish Highlander style her mother continually shows her and some of her own imaginative moves.
It’s a skill I hope she keeps for the rest of her life, this ability to mix classical training (of a sort) with regional traditions and her own imagination — expanding it beyond dance, there’s no telling what she could accomplish.
