Thesis
I am noticing a vibe shift. As we near the precipice of an AI-enabled productivity explosion, those in tech are rediscovering the beautiful and the cool.
Taste has always been in short supply in Silicon Valley. While the sweatpants and hoodie work attire was seen as a middle finger to other white collar professions and their stifling business culture pre-dotcom bubble, the trope of the technology brother living in complete degeneracy while he puts his craft or growth first is falling out of style. Silicon Valley is waking up to the idea that flashy credit cards with airport lounge passes and glass-filled mcmansions are in fact, soulless. If they weren’t soulless then the five figure ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon rainforest would be out of business. Leaders in tech are contributing to this shift. Patrick Collison now keeps an up-to-date reading list due to popular demand. Larry Ellison, a lifelong sailor, decided to bankroll what is essentially the Formula 1 of Sailing, the Sail GP. Cyan Bannister has been hanging out with Grammy award winning musicians at Smalls Jazz Club. Jeff Bezos is now jacked. In each of these examples is a hobby and in each of these hobbies is beauty.
Breaking the tech mono-culture is a good thing. As jobs are transformed, reimagined and lost to technological progress, human connection and understanding why humans are great will become more important. I don’t see a world where us humans pay to see an AI-generated movie, or an AI-generated symphony. AI image models can create wildly more complex and imaginative images than any human can today and yet no one really cares. Normal people appreciate craft just as much as Silicon Valley does, and for normal people, the stroke of a paint brush or their favourite line said by their favourite movie star is much easier to empathise with than the latest Arxiv paper. People in technology are waking up to this.
The Original Cool is Still Cool
I have noticed an uptick in the frequency of people in technology—non-musicians—attending live jazz concerts. People tend to post online when they do this. This makes sense: it’s a cool thing to do. The original cool. It’s also an intellectual thing to do, and Silicon Valley adores raw intellect like nowhere else. Ever since Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie invented “Bebop” in the 1940s, jazz music at its most cutting-edge has been an intellectual pursuit by both the artist and the listener. Musicians weave inside and out of a given harmony creating tension and release while the attentive listener follows the song form. A highly skilled group will interact with one another, break up the rhythm, superimpose different harmony and include motifs from other tunes entirely. Even an untrained listener will recognise the craft that goes into such a performance.
So why go out and listen to good jazz? We hear “Kind of Blue” and “Getz and Gilberto”, some of the greatest records of all time, in restaurants and elevators all the time. We listen to good jazz because it’s an intellectual pursuit. It’s cool. It’s extremely hard to execute and humans appreciate craft. At its best, you are blessed with a group of musicians who for most of their lives have been perfecting their craft and their sound. Most of all, you are hearing improvisation, and in that improvisation you are hearing who they have listened to, hundreds of years of western music theory, and the physical makeup of their bodies. For example, a saxophonist’s sound is shaped not only by how they put air in the horn, but the entire makeup of their oral cavity. This means that each sound is unique to that person.
This has made for some of the greatest music and feats of artistry ever created—Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” are innovative records that even normies have heard of. It has also made it mostly inaccessible to non-musicians since the dance band era of the 1930s. Because of that, you are being sold bad jazz.
Bad Jazz is Bad
For most non-musicians, jazz is functional music. Restaurants might play it in the background while you eat at a table with a warm, dim lamp in the middle. Sometimes restaurants employ humans to perform such background music. The term “elevator” music also comes to mind. The tune “Girl from Ipanema” is a staple of these functions and many famous records like “Getz and Gilberto” have thus been subject to the depths of restaurant Spotify playlists across the western world.
Jazz music at its worst is truly some of the worst music, akin to noise. The problem is because non-musicians see jazz as a cool, intellectual pursuit, they will google “Jazz Bars near me” and go listen to a few old guys playing American Songbook tunes for $50 each over a sea of voices and the clattering of glasses. Once tuned in, they are able to hear tunes like “Autumn Leaves” and “Blue Bossa” be absolutely murdered. Even to a non-musician this sounds bad, and the experience as a whole is likely to be remembered as a cool thing they don’t need to experience again.
I don’t blame non-musicians for not knowing that an underground place called “Spirithaus Gallery” in an Oakland industrial district is the place to be on Thursdays at 11pm-4am and features guest appearances by Grammy award winners like Thomas Pridgen and Ambrose Akinmusire and instead opting for the “Jazz Bar” in Union Square San Francisco. The unfortunate reality is that while they are being serenaded by the worst rendition of “Girl from Ipanema” to grace the earth, Ambrose is blowing in-group minds with tunes from his latest Album on the Blue Note Record label.
Go Out and Listen
As a proponent of this music, I want as many clever people to hear Ambrose play as possible.
What is my authority here? I am an engineer and I run a startup, but I am a far better jazz musician than either of those things. I moved to San Francisco when I was 19 on a full scholarship to play music. I still play most days but early on in my career I realised that a career as a performing musician is made up of soulless background gigs and elevator music with one-off concerts and tours that we practice for in-between. It’s not a life that I wanted to live and it’s not the music I wanted to play all the time. I do, however, respect the hell out of those that have rolled with the punches I mentioned, and have become true masters of their craft in the process. I also personally know many of these people and have played music with them. I know how they play a room and why they are the best at it. I know which masters they studied under and which greats of the music are their greatest influences. When you listen to good jazz music, you too can notice these things.
So I am starting this blog to help you go out and hear them play. Each week I will use my knowledge of the genre and its people to curate concert lists for you in San Francisco and New York City. I will also recommend listening to prime one’s ears.
The technology mono-culture can be broken. People who know what “good” is should educate others because letting others decide for themselves hasn’t worked. There is an appetite for that to happen right now as those on the frontier theorise what a beautiful world might look like in an age of AI. Individuals need to guide and facilitate the interweaving of technology and the given art form that they’re passionate about, especially while there is an appetite. A vibe shift.