Until recently, I had a dear friend named Ray who was really into jazz. Ray was in his 80s when I knew him and as a result was a bit of a gateway to Brighton in the 1950s. The 1950s Ray really loved jazz and in 2023 Ray was telling me what it was like to love jazz in Brighton back then. For the most part it was a town of cider bars, as Ray said, but beneath many of the bars were jazz establishments, all literally underground, and greats from all over the jazz world came and played in darkened, smoky rooms. this strange town stuck on the cold edge of England. It was always done under false names, which had something to do with managers and payments, I found out. The important part: you had to know to access any of it.
I thought of Ray earlier this week when I got an email about a new jazz record that appeared on Spotify and probably other places. I don’t get a lot of emails about jazz, which is surprising considering what an insufferable hipster I still am, but this is a record called Zelda & Jazz by The Deku Trio, so it slipped by. Pause at that name: The Deku Trio. Anyway, here’s a series of “forward-leaning arrangements” of classic Zelda music originally written by Koji Kondo. I’ve been listening to it all week, leaning forward as well as the rest of the team at EG, I get it. I was listening, thinking about Raya, and also thinking about how jazz and Zelda go so well together.
Let’s say up front that this topic is something that my colleague Edwin has already covered much more intelligently than I’m about to. Breath of the Wild’s scattered, free-wheeling piano is distinctly jazzy, and it’s claimed to be a great guiding hand at the player’s elbow, wherever the free-wheeling freewheeling game might take you. If you’re only going to read one article about Zelda and Jazz today, go read this one – it’s a great piece.
But beyond all that, I still think about Ray and jazz as he encountered it, jazz as an underground experience that you had to be in. And I think of one jazz show I was at by myself, lured to London by a Hammond-obsessed friend and the promise of a Hammond virtuoso, Dr. Lonnie Smith, who occasionally played particularly important solos through the nose. I was on this show, I listened, and I realized I knew absolutely nothing about it. Have you ever listened to music in public that you don’t really understand? People clapped at seemingly random moments. People were nodding to each other and casually admitting to events that I hadn’t even noticed happening. After a while, my ignorance, while shameful, became somewhat exciting. I felt like an explorer in a distant nebula encountering some kind of physical field that my senses could not reliably confirm.
Part of me wants more from the jazz I’m listening to now. I want to be deliriously bewildered and carried away, delighted by all the magical things I don’t yet understand, but also fervently want to understand. I want to be in the picture one day! I think Zelda & Jazz is a bit more subtle than all of this, and that’s because I already know Zelda. So when the album opens with Ocarina of Time and I hear those first few notes and then the brush, I’m back in Hyrule Field with the fog and the moon and the accompanying jazz cymbal twinkle is there right from the start. Zelda’s lullaby becomes a glass staircase ascending a dreamy night and I’m right there. Lost Woods, meanwhile, which adds these playful twills of sound to the end of some familiar notes, captures the player’s confusion in a way that I’m also ready for. As the subject warps, speeds up and slows down and goes in unexpected directions, I think: of course it does. We are all lost in the forest together.
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I’m further led by Trio Deku, riffing on Zelda in a way that reminds me of the way each new Zelda game riffs on the rules and rituals of games that came before, sometimes straight up repeating famous bits, sometimes diving into the game. deep cut. Harmonious stuff, but maybe this Zelda/jazz combination is getting another preoccupation that I can only fingertip.
My stepmother, who is a musician and has the most profound case of synesthesia of anyone I’ve ever met – the days of the week hang at different heights, the numbers are different colors and tastes, her migraines are Busby Berkeley numbers – once said that music was for her place. I don’t think she was anything but literal. It has geometry and surfaces. It has nooks and crannies. I think it has something to do with jazz for me, because I can’t imagine jazz at all without thinking of the first pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the black narrator lives secretly “rent-free in an all-whites-tenanted building,” in a part of the basement that it was closed and forgotten.
Down here, he connected the ceiling with exactly “1369 lights… and not fluorescent lights, but the older, operationally more expensive type, fiber”. This is part of his fight with Monopolated Light and Power and it is not over. He has a radio phonograph and plans to have another. Five in total. “When I have music, I want to feel its vibrations not only through my ear but through my entire body. I’d love to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ – all at the same time.”
That’s jazz, I guess. And while it would be impossible for me to connect it to Zelda in a meaningful way, these moments are still subtly blurring for me: Zelda loves worlds juxtaposed and two ideas of place that stand in opposition.
More. I first discovered Sun Ra a while ago at a great art show at Turner Contemporary, composer, poet, bandleader, artist—there’s no end to it. One image of the man led me to a fascination that has gripped me the same way Zelda did for the past few years when A Link to the Past came out. I read books. I try to understand what I hear when I listen to Sun Ra.
Again, these things are not remotely the same, but engaging with both is somewhat similar. Here I am, encouraged to explore bright, brilliant things and witness spectacular beauty, all with expertise, virtuosity and boundless imagination.