I Didn't Like Jazz - Exhibition | Sep 2020

"I didn't like Jazz" was an exhibition I showed on September 2020 in Beit Ha'amudim (Jazz Club) , in Tel Aviv. Like the headline describes, I really didn't like Jazz. But on May of 2019 I met my favorite person in the world, Eviatar Slivnik, who made me see jazz (and the rest of the world) in a new light. After meeting in Berlin (where i lived at the time) , Covid 19 brought Evi and I back to Tel Aviv for what became a year, and most of our nights where spent at Beit Ha'amudim , the home of the Israeli Jazz scene.

I learned to like Jazz and I was excited about it , so excited - that I wrote this "menifest" of how I learnd to like it. A text that explains others what is Jazz. But as you can read, im not a writer - I had to find a real reason for people to read what i wrote. SO, I started drawing. I made 7 pen on paper artworks of Jazz legends (with human bodies, of course) and that manifest text became an "artist statement" and was available as a brochure. Here are some pictures and than the text (translated from Hebrew by Chatgpt):

I Didn’t Like Jazz.

And of course, a title like that would lead to a story about why today I feel differently—the complete opposite, actually. In the past year I discovered that I hadn’t understood the full picture. I was exposed to a wonderful, rare, enchanted world—maybe even one at risk of extinction. Here I will tell my story about jazz, precisely as someone who is not a musician: as someone who started out as an openly declared anti-jazz person, as a fly on the wall, experiencing it as a fascinating story. And why am I the one writing about a subject I didn’t take part in until recently? Because the people who do take part live it so deeply that they have absolutely no need to explain to anyone why. I imagined arrogant, polished elevator music; wedding receptions with budgets that are far too high; I imagined an audience sitting with their legs crossed, clapping just to signal something. I imagined an irritating, frustrating money industry of people pretending they care about what they do—but come on, admit it, you yourselves don’t even understand what you just played, and it’s all nonsense dressed up to look important. So here’s the point: there is no connection between anything written above and jazz. None. Jazz is Black music—underground, without money, and with more passion and freedom than I have ever seen. Jazz was born from frustration, alcohol, hard lives, hard drugs, and whatever random instrument happened to be around—so that all of it could be expressed somehow. Jazz is cool. It is the peak of cool. Everything we call cool in the world of music started there and rolled on from that point. For me, in a pretty funny way, the music itself is not the issue at all. I mean, the music is definitely the issue for everyone doing the work—but as someone who isn’t doing that work, and can’t fully understand it either, I found a strong connection specifically to the frame, the context, the world that formed around that central core. For example: Someday My Prince Will Come. I first encountered that magic through Snow White, but there is also a recording by Miles Davis—no less enchanting. To understand this story, you need to know that usually when jazz is played, there is a leading melody (the “head”), and then they go into a round of solos—horn, piano, bass, and then drums—after which they return to the opening melody one more time and end the piece with it. So in Miles’s version of that Snow White tune, after the melody that is supposed to lead into the end of the song, a few more chords continue unexpectedly, and then comes an unusual saxophone solo by John Coltrane. Rumor has it that after Coltrane left Miles’s group, and between sets—while he was performing in a club across the street—he showed up at the studio unexpectedly, most likely completely high, and signaled to the musicians to go out with him for one final solo, which to this day is considered one of the iconic moments of his life. Whether the story is true, half true, or a legend, for me it gave that solo another layer and another kind of intrigue, and I heard it in a different and new light that made me fall in love. Like that—whether I was looking for it or not—while I was spending time surrounded by this environment, I found many more reasons to fall in love with the style and the scene. For years, Beit HaAmudim has served as a home for jazz musicians in Israel. It took time for it to truly click for me how insane—and how not at all obvious—it is that a place like that exists in this country. Around the 1940s, the jazz world was concentrated mostly on 52nd Street in New York. That street was, in the eyes of all the musicians in the genre, the center of the world: that is where all the magic started and continued, among real jazz clubs. I write “real” because there are many places in the world today that I once called jazz clubs, but today, after I was truly exposed, I can’t call them that anymore—because they’re not. And those real ones have almost disappeared. By “real” I mean a place that first and foremost functions as a home for anyone in the scene—no matter where in the world they come from. I mean a bar that stays alive into the small hours of the night, playing in the background the music that ties this whole story together—unless some drunk musician gets up to play himself. In a place like that, both the greatest musicians and the dreaming kids show up, sitting table next to table. They can go there night after night without pause—drinking and smoking and playing and listening and being who they are with people who sanctify the same sacred thing they do. And like I wrote, the truly real jazz clubs are disappearing—but there is still one like that: the only one in the Middle East and among the few in Europe. You won’t believe it—in the center of Tel Aviv. The ones on the front lines: the ones who will defend this group’s temple with their bodies and souls. For years, Beit HaAmudim has been fighting the extremely difficult Israeli bureaucracy, taxes and authorities, and now also the coronavirus, in order to continue serving as a warm home for every musician in the local scene. Every evening, musicians can arrive alone—and be together. To play, to listen, to hum along with the solo in the background, to drink a glass of whiskey inside cigarette smoke—and I sit there as if blending in, but really watching from the side, trying to contain all that magic. They live this world in a way I had never known: behavioral norms, humor, language, an entire way of life. The scene is so small that it is almost impossible that two veterans in it would not know each other. I used to think that a saying like, “If you’re not known in the scene, you’re probably not enough of a jazz musician,” is arrogant and closed off. But a sentence like that actually means it isn’t enough to play jazz tunes. Being a jazz musician also means living the scene: showing up in the places you need to show up, knowing the people you need to know, and absolutely—playing with them. Knowing by heart the records that shaped this world, the stories about the personalities behind them, and the private jokes. There are certain call-and-response patterns that unfortunately cannot come through without using your ears: when one jazz musician starts humming, everyone else—without thinking twice—will know how to answer. It’s the kind of thing you cannot exactly explain, or learn on paper, and it moves me to hear it again and again. A jazz musician practices their entire life—days and nights, alone and together—learning harmony and theory with the ambition of reaching the highest level that exists, so that when the time comes on stage, they can sanctify the moment and “simply” respond to what is happening around them. They are hardly required to cling to the instructions on sheet music pages; instead, they must adjust to a reality that changes in differences of seconds. To improvise out of endless knowledge and tools they acquired after years of hard work. It took me time to understand how much sharpness and communication are necessary on stage for the pianist to quote a joke, and for the drummer to answer with a sharp comeback that makes him understand he’s there for him—listening to every tiny detail, and understanding. Everything can be missed if you blink too slowly. “Selfish music—they’re only waiting for the solo.”They are not only waiting for the solo. They listen, and they enjoy one another’s musical vocabulary. They never stop learning—even when we sit in the audience—and sometimes they communicate like this far better than in their native language. The word “solo” in jazz takes on a different meaning. Instead of ego and one frontman standing in front, the leader in jazz is ready and open at every moment to change and be changed according to the other members of the band. And in general, all of it is dedicated to—and sanctifies—a purpose larger than any one person. If I wanted to release an album now, I would write a few songs together with suitable arrangements for every instrument I would want to take part in my work. I would find good musicians who would come and perform, as best as possible, exactly how I imagine my song should sound. If a jazz musician, on the other hand, wants to release an album, all they need to do is create a combination of musicians such that if each one of them expresses themselves one hundred percent, the connection will be the strongest and most musical. In a world other than jazz—maybe parallel—that is how I introduced myself. In the world of visual art, and in recent years as a tattoo artist, I try as much as possible to express myself one hundred percent and reach an audience that will support that choice. In fact, my connection to the tattoo machine is incidental; the art came first. Just like the connection between a jazz musician and their instrument is less important than the musical path they chose to take. And on the day I understood how similar it is, a kind of calm settled over me. Our two missions as a couple—he as a musical artist and I as a visual artist—merged into one shared mission, and the exhibition, here at Beit HaAmudim, is a natural outcome of this path together: a small collection of key figures in the history of jazz, in my own personal visual interpretation—one that always gets carried away into combining animals and humans—specifically at Beit HaAmudim, because it is the real place. And when Eran asked me whether the space should be arranged in a way that would better suit exhibiting the paintings, I knew I wanted the people to blend exactly into their natural environment—between cigarette smoke, glasses of whiskey, and music.