A Generous Offer to Skip Your Friend's Avant-Garde Jazz Debut

Hey Johann,

Headlining is a big step, and genuinely, I'm proud of you. You've wanted to go solo since you quit your first band, and it's a real shame that "moody egoist" turned out to be the job description for the next three frontmen too. But now you're up there alone, finally free — unlike, say, Brooklyn rent, which remains a tyranny no saxophone can overthrow. To stay in jazz's capital you'll need either an investor or a dead parent, and your mom, tragically for your art, still jogs three miles a day.

So here's what I'm proposing: twenty thousand dollars, cash or Venmo or Zelle or whatever new digital middleman I've failed to learn about, in exchange for me not attending Thursday's show.

I want to be clear this isn't about the music. I love live music — it's basically my hobby. I'm just after a very specific emotional experience, the kind that produces the word "yippie," not the kind that produces the sentence "there are six people here, I cannot leave without ending up on somebody's blog." I know how that sounds, given that I've seen you play before. But that's exactly the problem. I've seen you play before. At the Casa Gentry show I bit clean through my own cheek trying to stay conscious during what I believe was a fourteen-minute tribute to a W.E.B. Du Bois misquote. Avant-garde jazz seems sterile and bloodless right up until the moment you taste actual blood, your own, self-inflicted, out of sheer boredom. That's not nothing. That's a review, honestly.

Please don't take this personally, or as a comment on your gift. Take the money. I haven't had eight uninterrupted hours to myself in weeks, and NecroBeast is in town two nights later, and I would like to go into that pit fresh, not pre-drained by an hour of flute-and-silence experiments that make me feel like a Pip-Boy nobody can switch off.

I know jazz is a long unbroken chain of ideas, connecting grad students in Flatbush to the teacher living next door to them, and I know you're proof that innovation is alive and well while everyone else chases the cheap high of an audience actually enjoying itself. You'll run any experiment, however many times it's already been run, and your music remains proudly, unrelentingly for you. Consider this twenty thousand dollars a grant. An award. The MacArthur of not making me watch.

And Vodou Bill's! Even I've heard of Vodou Bill's. Fifty years giving Black music's most daring acts a stage, and now it's an avant-garde jazz club — proof that gentrification isn't only about rent. You're part of that history now. The only difference is you're the one getting paid, which, again, is sort of my whole pitch.

I get that a friendly face in the crowd matters. So take the money and hire one. Twenty grand buys you twenty friendly faces, or ten strangers willing to become friends over an hour of bass-and-desert-wind improvisation, or, depending on your area code, several minor felonies. This is your night, and I am thrilled — genuinely, warmly thrilled — not to see it.

I love you like a brother, and I'd skip my actual brother's avant-garde jazz debut too, given the chance. But you didn't get this far listening to haters, so keep going, keep fighting, keep proving everyone who never sent cold hard cash wrong.

Check Zelle. I left a tip.

Distilled from New Yorker Humor