From a recent edition of Slate comes a lovely blog post from Isaac Butler, who rediscovered his passion for jazz after challenging himself to find the fragment of music originally responsible for his interest in jazz. It is a brief, satisfying read…
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More than two years ago, as summer changed to fall, I was walking to the gym when I heard, wafting out of the window of a restaurant, a snatch of a jazz song. It was a minor third, descending to the root, first on a trumpet, then on a saxophone, repeated several times over shifting chords. That’s it. Just a wisp of a song, really, barely a few bars, not much more than a fragment.
Yet this fragment lodged in me, the minor third recalling itself. At some earlier time in my life, perhaps during the brief period in high school when I studied jazz, I had heard that interval over those shifting chords. After a few days of
