There is an old Indian legend about several blind men examining an elephant. Each examines a different part of the creature and comes to a completely dissimilar conclusion as to what it is. Then the elephant, in a state of musth, stomps the helpless bastards to death to get at a '67 VW Microbus he mistakes for a particularly attractive female. The moral of the story is not to let handicapped people screw around with elephants.
But like that story, where each man forms his own opinion of what he is encountering based on his limited experience of it and thus seals his own doom, there is more than one moral which may be derived from this fable.
Bear with me, kids, I'm going somewhere with this.
Ask the average Joe (not Joe Pass, obviously) what kind of person listens to Jazz, and you are likely to get a blind-man-meets-elephant response. The top two responses will likely be “middle-aged, middle-class white guys" and “pretentious hipster kids who think obscure underground bands with names like Shrödinger's Quantum Litterbox are still too mainstream."
But like that story, where each man forms his own opinion of what he is encountering based on his limited experience of it and thus seals his own doom, there is more than one moral which may be derived from this fable.
Bear with me, kids, I'm going somewhere with this.
Ask the average Joe (not Joe Pass, obviously) what kind of person listens to Jazz, and you are likely to get a blind-man-meets-elephant response. The top two responses will likely be “middle-aged, middle-class white guys" and “pretentious hipster kids who think obscure underground bands with names like Shrödinger's Quantum Litterbox are still too mainstream."
