Jazz hands

Just spent a pleasant evening with my g/f at a jazz club just a few minutes from the house. Now anybody who knows me will already be aware of my ignorance of most things musical, but my ignorance of jazz goes above and beyond that standard setting by some orders of magnitude.

So, a few things I've learned this evening:

My missus gets sufficiently drunk on one cocktail and two glasses of wine to skip down the street singing. In truth, this was already well-known to me.

Good jazz musicians, to my ignorant ears at least, have got unbelievable talent and hands which move in a blur. Also, they sound like they're just free-forming but then, with no discernible signal, suddenly all hit the same notes together and were evidently following a rhythm and score which were quite hidden to me the entire time.

If you're putting together a jazz composition, there are clearly some fundamental rules which must be followed if you're to be taken seriously. I suspect that, like my missus' all too well-known lightweight tendencies, none of this will be a revelation to anybody who's actually into music. But here goes:

1) Under no circumstances make the piece less than 20 minutes long. I assume any idiot newbie writer who makes such a schoolboy error as to produce a shorter piece is thrown out of whatever passes for a jazz writers' union for the affront.

2) The above important rule of composition length has clearly been imposed to allow the saxophonist, after a long, long, loooong intro, to stand at the side and let the other musicians have their solos while he presumably gets his breath back. At least five minutes of high-speed drumming, best done with the drummer's eyes firmly closed. A bit of piano thrown in if the drummer doesn't mind. Then cue the sax again, who clearly knows exactly where they are in the piece despite it sounding like it could be anywhere to me.

3) Make the title of the piece correspondingly long.

4) Don't let people think they know when the end is coming. It must at several points during the latter stages sound like it's finishing, only to then go on longer than the final scenes at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, before eventually expiring on a single, sharp note which catches you by surprise.

5) Having seen a world class professional do it, I've come to the depressing conclusion that I'm probably never going to realise my long-held ambition of standing at the back of a band in smokey clubs looking cool and plucking at a double bass for a living. Apparently you have to hit all the right notes and everything, and at no point did he spin it about its pointy foot thingy, which I was always under the impression was the hardest and therefore, for me at least, most dangerous bit of the occupation. This has proved sadly untrue.

All in all, a most instructive evening.