(3089/898) Caged jazz

1672) The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking - that is, in succession - like in a panel discussion or a group of individuals simply imposing their remarks without responding to each other. If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words. [...] The person responsible for keeping the beat in jazz does not slow it down or speed it up, does he? Now, when we have something, do we always have to have this measurement of it? I think that, if you examine these things, which you think you like about jazz, and then apply them to your daily life - that is to say outside the field of jazz music altogether - you will discover that they are thing you really have no use for. [...] If [the main premise of jazz is the regular time], then I don't want any part of it because I don't see it as relating to anything I can use. I don't mean in music, I mean use in my life. The clock is okay ticking away second by second: It is useful if I have to catch a train, but I don't think that catching a train is one of the most interesting aspects of my living. I think those times that I am most full with the enjoyment of life are precisely those times when the ticking of the clock, the passing of time, is forgotten. So, likewise, with measurement. The reiterated beat in jazz reminds me of all those aspects of my life which don't seem to be the most interesting.

Rock and roll is more interesting to me than jazz. [...] The impression is gives is not one of discourse but of everybody in agreement [...] There is no discussion. This business of one thing being free while something else is not free bothers me. Everyone seems to be together in rock and roll music. [...] It's a curious thing, but the reason the beat doesn't oppress me as much in rock and roll as it does in jazz, I think, is because the volume is so high. In other words, one's attention is taken away from the beat by the amplitude. The volume of sound is so great that it blurs, as it were, the fact of the beat. Any other ways that one might discover to blur the fact of the beat would increase, actually, the rhythmic interest, as least as far as I am concerned, of the music being made, whether it was jazz or not. [...] [W]hen time is organized by the regular beat, we [...] lose essentially the rhythm.

John Cage
interviewed by Michael Zwerin in
"A Lethal Measurement" in
Village Voice (1/6/1966)
republished in John Cage (1970)
Richard Kostelanatz, ed.