Jazz experiment

Jazz originated in the inner city with Harlem hosting the first major jazz club, Minton’s. As a direct result, those around the music faced many of the same problems that those around hip-hop, for example, face today: drugs, poverty, and violence. In the 40’s and 50’s, drugs were a part of jazz partially because drugs were in the environment where jazz thrived, which is probably why early artists got into them in the first place. After that, a vicious cycle took over – jazz was trapped in a drug-infested area, the inner city, and drugs became a form of validation for artists.

Jazz is one of the most complicated genres in music because it flies in the face of all that classical music theory preaches. Gone are the well-tuned chords and perfect harmonies of the piano. In “Little Rootie Tootie,” Monk plays clashing chords throughout the song, a sin no classical piano player would ever commit. Thus, my conjecture is that the drugs were, and possibly still are, a tool to compose and comprehend jazz. In particular, marijuana is known to alter perception in general and can affect how an artist feels the musical space of a certain song. When listening to jazz, I often wonder how anyone has the mental capacity to arrange jazz pieces. Rock stars, r&b artists, and classical composers have a set of rules (chord progression, music theory, etc.) that they follow to make their music, but jazz doesn’t have any of that. Furthermore, pieces that are improvised are more difficult still to play – the average musician would have a very hard time playing a piece well spontaneously.

To see if my hypothesis held any truth at all, I decided to set up an experiment and test it. I got some friends together and explained my paper and problem to them. They agreed to help me test my hypothesis, that marijuana aids the understanding of and creativity within a musical space. We picked songs of various genres to increase the scope of our experiment. The songs picked were Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd), Going to Califronia (Led Zeplin), Because (The Beatles), Blueberry Yum Yum (Ludacris), Higher (Twista), and Yeah (Lil’ John). I purposely left a jazz song off the list because I wanted the songs to be ones that everyone was familiar with. The songs were all listened to first once through and then again under the influence of marijuana. The results were clear – marijuana definitely influenced the way the music was perceived.

The most overwhelming feeling was that I was inside the music. The first time through, I felt that we were hearing the music and could pick it apart, but the music was definitely more distant. The second time through was completely different – though it sounds cheesy, I actually felt at one with the music. I could focus in on individual components of the songs and drown out all the other parts instantly. The time of the music also seemed slowed down, making analysis of the songs easier. Furthermore, I attached symbols and meaning to different aspects of the songs much quicker than I normally would have done. Different instruments and sounds seemed louder and oddly distorted but in an audibly pleasing way. From an artist’s standpoint, it would be much easier to immerse oneself in the music and spontaneously harmonize with other instruments after smoking marijuana, provided the loss in dexterity due to it is not too much.

Thus, I concluded that my hypothesis was at least partially correct. Marijuana definitely has the capacity to increase musical creativity. Even if artists didn’t do it while they played, it could possibly have assisted them in composing material. It possibly taps into an unconscious part of the brain that allows the senses, hearing in particular, to be manipulated and sharpened while simultaneously freeing one from standard societal confines. Jazz, a genre nonconformist in nature, would be a prime example of an expansion in musical creativity due to marijuana.