By my rough count, this past week’s broadcast was the 50th distinct episode of Breaking Jazz to air here on KSDS. I hope you’ve found the programming to be fresh yet familiar, comfortable yet adventurous, clever yet heartfelt, athletic yet soulful.
I hope you’ve encountered here virtuosity that’s more than just an intellectually stimulating exercise in sound. Virtuosity in service of tuneful music making. Music to help you better grasp for a moment’s peace or excitement or transcendence or whatever makes life awe-inspiring or worthwhile for you personally.
”Breaking Jazz,” a new jazz release show bringing you the music and musicians of the moment — jazz as it’s being played today — airs Sunday evenings, 6:30 to 8 p.m. PT, on KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM in San Diego and all around the world at jazz88.org and the KSDS mobile app.
There are drugs for all this stuff, but music gets you there cleaner and safer. And, as a species, it seems we come pre-programmed not just to produce music but to receive it, to synthesize its disparate elements and derive sustenance from it. Music, when done right, is like great literature. It speaks to and on behalf of the human condition.
Except where words fall short, music picks up the slack, speaking to and for both the primitive beast and highly evolved miracle creature that share an awkward, often contentious life sentence as roommates in a building where you’re a reluctant landlord with no prior management experience.
We all want to be loved but what we all NEED — the foundational compulsion — is to be understood. And the tools we have are all necessary but not completely sufficient. You want to really get to know someone? Really listen and try to understand the music they can’t live without.
This is as far as I’ve gotten.
