"Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny."

Tonight guitar legend Allan Holdsworth played a set at Johnny D's. Cover was pretty steep, especially for those in the crowd with their heads craned to watch the ballgame on the corner television. The guys beside me were discussing the span between Holdsworth's thumb and pinkie. Behind me an older fellow in a bandanna was lamenting to a silent father and son how cheap tequila used to be in Mexicali back in his day. Aside from the waitresses, there were no single women in the entire joint.

Here is my relationship to jazz: I love practically everything from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane. After that it gets a little dicey. Mahavishnu Orchestra were really good. And some of Tony Williams' stuff. But by and large, post-Coltrane jazz sounds very safe and sterile to me. There's a certain danger aspect to Charlie Parker hunched on some cellar bandstand struggling not to keel over into the kickdrum from all the heroin in his blood. The sound of those acoustic instruments being emotionally pummeled and sucked into the cheap little microphones gave it such vitality. Once electricity - particularly electric keyboards - were introduced to the equation, it just doesn't seem to contain that same sense of rage and despair. It just contains a lot of notes.

Alright, so Holdsworth. Indisputably a great instrumentalist. But the music never seems to start until he steps on the fuzzbox and starts playing runs. Before that it's nothing more than a string of arbitrary "jazzy" chords. In a way it reminds me of heavy metal in the late eighties where you had a lot of stock guitar riffs (generally derived from Ace Frehley) and throwaway lyrics about boobs and authority, and the musicians in the audience would wait patiently for the interlude, at which point the guitarist would kick the singer aside and whip through his arsenal of heavily practiced twiddly bits. Afterwards you'd think, if that's the exciting part, why bother even having a song around it? Holdsworth is in a class far above all that, of course. I'm familiar with him primarily through his 1985 album Metal Fatigue, which features a placid singer who always made me think of the sort of featureless crooners you find in Holiday Inn lounges in places like Iowa. And the music wasn't too interesting until he was booted aside and Holdsworth took over. There was no such singer present tonight, however. The trio was comprised of Holdsworth, one-time Zappa drummer Chad Wackerman (whose name still makes the adolescent in me smirk), and Jimmy Johnson on bass.

For a supposedly cerebral form of music, the response to showmanship was noteworthy. It seems pretty easy to get a roar out of the audience by using a handful of gimmicks. Usually a lot of fast runs culminating in a high repetitive figure will do it. Sweeping arpeggios high on the neck are also reliable crowdpleasers. The drummer too can get the crowd excited by a lengthy fill featuring a fast circular pattern on the toms. Meanwhile the bassist can grab a lot of attention for himself by deploying a few fleetfingered hammer-ons, especially if done while quickly ascending or descending the fretboard.

I generally found the music to be meditative. I would pay close attention to the intricacy of certain sections, then find myself sooner or later drifting off into abstract thought. I don't think that was the same as being bored.