All that jazz...

I really love jazz. When did I start loving it? I'm not sure but I really got into it this year. I was listening to a lot of Frank Sinatra last year so I guess I was always headed down this path. Probably listening to songs from the soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop also skewed my taste in this direction. Once I got into office this year I felt like I needed to liven things up a bit so I made sure my computer was playing some music all the time. Since I didn't have any mp3s in my office computer, I decided to use the Windows Media Player radio stations. Also, since I was working, it needed some good music that would not distract me. Enter: jazz.

I finally managed to get my friends to come along with me to the popular jazz club here in Club 199 called No Liezz earlier this year. They have a different live jazz band playing every Friday night. Last night I went there for the second time with some friends. There is a cover charge of $5 but since beers, wines and base spirits cost $3, buying 2 drinks would already save you more than the entrance fee. It was Friday the 13th so the jazz band for that night was going to play "superstitious jazz". Didn't find anything superstitious about the jazz. It was great though! They were really good and played some of my favourite tunes including Fly Me To The Moon, The Girl From Ipanema and the theme from the Pink Panther. They even did a jazz version of "Livin' La Vida Loca"! It was a musical feast to my ears and thoroughly calmed my mind. It feels so good to have a Vodka Martini while listening to jazz. To cap the night off, my number was the first to be called out during the raffle draw and I won a bottle of Chardonnay! Talk about value. I probably left with more than I came in with...

I feel pretty cultured recently. Just last Sunday I made use of my free tickets to a broadway musical called South Pacific being performed at the Adelaide Festival Centre. It was my first stage play and I was looking forward to it. The story was a love story/drama musical with an orchestra playing in the background. The songs were all very catchy and the storyline was not too bad to boot. All in all it was an enjoyable experience and I couldn't have really asked for more from the play. I have another free ticket to attend a violin performance next week and am really looking forward to it.

I was having a friendly argument with a friend recently about how a person is defined as "cultured" and what is involved in becoming cultured. I was basically just teasing him that to be cultured you need to know how to enjoy all the different aspects of life from musicals to plays and even to all types of food rather than always falling back to what you are familiar with. What is culture anyway? It is meant to be beliefs, patterns, attitudes and behaviour that a group of people practise or live by in their daily life. However we always say that you need to learn to adopt certain practices which are not necessarily familiar to your background. For example, a person who eats with his/her hands every day as part of his/her culture would in the formal world need to learn to adapt to the culture of eating with a variety of cutlery. In this way you are actually losing culture to gain it. Interesting no? I guess there are two different meanings to the word culture. One as I have defined previously. The other one is something created by society to elevate the group practising that culture to a higher level as compared to people not practising that culture. This is usually a Western culture where men should wear a suit with a tie, adopt a "ladies first" behaviour, using polite words and terms in speech and so on. These people tend to look at others who are not as prim and proper as they are as being of a lower-class than them. Pity that most people can't accept others as they are and that outward appearance accounts for most peoples' perception towards others. Culture is difficult to change and can only be done gradually over a long period of time. Oh well, let's all just live and let live shall we? At the same time we can learn more about other cultures while we're at it to appreciate the diversity present in this world. There's so much to learn and experience so why be content with your own island when there is a whole wide world out there to explore? Enjoy all the colours of life. I know I am!