Until recently I had a good friend named Ray who was really into jazz. Ray was in his eighties when I knew him, and as a result he was something of a gateway to Brighton in the fifties. Ray was really into jazz in the 1950s, and in 2023 Ray was there to tell me what it was like to love jazz in Brighton back then. It was largely a cider bar town, as Ray said, but many of the bars included jazz venues, all literally underground, and the greats from all over the jazz world would come to play in darkened, smoky rooms. this strange city lingered on the cold edge of England. This always happened under assumed names, which I understand had something to do with managers and payments. Most importantly, you had to be in the know to access all this.
I was thinking about Ray earlier this week when I got an email about a new jazz record that had dropped on Spotify and probably other places. I don’t get many emails about jazz, which is surprising considering the insufferable hipster I still am, but this is a record called Zelda & Jazz, by The Deku Trio, so that slipped through the cracks. Pause for that name: The Deku Trio. Anyway, here’s a series of “forward-facing arrangements” of classic Zelda music, originally written by Koji Kondo. I’ve been listening to it all week, hunched over, as has the rest of the team at EG, I gather. I’ve been listening, thinking about Ray, and also thinking about how jazz and Zelda fit so well together.
Let me preface this by saying that this is a topic that my colleague Edwin has covered far more intelligently than I will. Breath of the Wild’s scattered, free-wheeling piano is distinctly jazzy, and, as he argues, it’s a brilliant guiding hand on the player’s elbow wherever a scattered, free-wheeling game takes you. If you’re only going to read one article about Zelda and jazz today, go ahead and read this one – it’s a beautifully written piece.
But apart from that, I keep thinking about Ray and jazz as he encountered it, jazz as an underground experience that you had to be there for. And I think about the one jazz show I went to myself, lured to London by a Hammond-obsessed friend and the promise of a Hammond virtuoso, Dr. Lonnie Smith, who sometimes played particularly important solos with his nose. I was at that show, listening in, and I realized that I was completely out of the loop. Have you ever listened to music in public and not really understood it? People applauded at what seemed like completely random moments. People nodded to each other and cheerfully acknowledged events that I hadn’t even noticed when they were happening. After a while, my ignorance, while embarrassing, also became a little exciting. I felt like an explorer in a distant nebula, encountering some kind of physical field that my senses couldn’t reliably confirm.
Part of me wants more of that from all the jazz I’m listening to right now. I want to be happily confused and transported, enraptured by all those magical things that I don’t understand yet, but that I also desperately want to understand. I want to be in the know one day! Zelda & Jazz is a little milder than all this, I think, 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 a brushstroke, I’m back in Hyrule field with the mist and the moon, and the accompanying sparkle of jazz cymbal just feels right from the start. Zelda’s Lullaby becomes a glass stairway rising through the dreamy night and I’m totally on board with it. Lost Woods, which adds these playful twills of sound at the end of certain familiar notes, captures the player’s confusion in a way that I’m prepared for, too. As the theme warps and speeds up and slows down and goes in unexpected directions, I think: Of course it does. We’re all lost in the woods together.
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Further along, the Deku Trio led me, riffing on Zelda in a way that reminds me of the way each new Zelda game follows the rules and rituals of the games that came before it, sometimes rehashing famous bits in succession, sometimes diving into a deep slit. Harmonious stuff, but perhaps this combination of Zelda and jazz taps into some other preoccupation that I can only fathom with my fingertips.
My stepmother, who is a musician and who has the most severe case of synesthesia of anyone I have ever met – the days of the week are at different heights, the numbers are different colors and flavors, her migraines are Busby Berkeley numbers – ever tells me that music is a place for her. I don’t think she did anything other than literally. It has geometry and surfaces. It has nooks and caves. That for me is connected to jazz, I think, because I can’t think about jazz at all without thinking of the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the black narrator secretly lives rent-free in a building that is strictly rented of whites,” in an area of the basement that has been locked up and forgotten.
Down here he has the ceiling fitted with exactly “1369 lamps… and not fluorescent, but the older, more expensive kind, the incandescent kind.” This is part of his battle with Monopolated Light and Power, and it’s not over yet. He has a radiophonograph and he plans to have more. Five in all. “If I have music, I want to do that feeling the vibrations, not just with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like 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 this to Zelda in any meaningful way, these moments do come together gently for me: Zelda loves worlds juxtaposed, and two ideas of places that are in contrast are fixed together.
More. A while back, at a wonderful art show at the Turner Contemporary, I first discovered Sun Ra, the composer, poet, bandleader, artist—there’s no end to him. One photo of the man has sparked a fascination that has gripped me for the past few years like Zelda did when A Link to the Past came out. I read books. I try to make sense of what I’m hearing when I listen to Sun Ra.
Again, these things are not the same thing in the slightest, but the engagement in both is somewhat similar. Here I am, encouraged to discover bright, brilliant things and witness spectacular beauty, all delivered with expertise, virtuosity and boundless imagination.