AIN’T DJAZ’T PLAY’N
Around 1910, a musicologist from New York heard an old pianist playing in a bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had never heard such music before, so he asked the pianist what kind of music it was. The pianist replied, in his thick Southern accent:
I am just playing.
The musicologist heard “jazz” and, upon returning to New York, wrote about this new music called jazz.
This word-of-mouth story from the South is not an established etymology of the word “jazz,” but it remains a plausible story.
In this piece, I let my hands evolve autonomously across the keys.
I am not doing jazz but I am just playing.