The first time I listened to jazz I was 13 years old and I did not understand anything. Kind of Blue was the first album I played. Nothing was clear, the rare passages harmonically conforming to my habits were quickly overtaken by an unpredictable dissonance. All of it made for an indecipherable chaos. I was definitively impervious to this music that held unparalleled prestige. I was impervious to jazz, too bad. I thought about it for days. Fragments came back to me: the first double bass notes of Flamenco Sketches or the first three chords of Blue in Green. Until one day I decided with sincere desire to replay the album.

For eight years I have been listening to this album every month. The visceral rejection that jazz had provoked in me has given way to a passionate obsession. What appeared dissonant and confused now feel as marvelous and virtuosic. I tried to understand what had happened, why everything sounded so different. My search opened the door to dizzying questions and the beginning of an answer. To use Francois Bégaudeau's words, it's difficult to talk about music and our feeling toward it, precisely because words always relate to images and, music being only sound, it is more abstract and thus escapes language. Western music theory proposes to study this art as an object, to describe it with concepts and sometimes prescribe it with rules.

Music is made of notes, notes are sounds, sounds are vibrations in the air. The quantity of air vibration emitted by a note is its frequency, expressed in Hz (264 Hz for C, for example). Each sound emits a fundamental frequency and a bundle of other frequencies that are multiples of the fundamental (132, 396, 528Hz for C, for example). A single note means nothing, in the sense that it doesn't convey any particular emotion. It takes on meaning in a context: the notes placed before and after it give it an emotion. A distance between two notes (played simultaneously or at the same time) is called an interval. For an impenetrable reason, the combination of several notes will sound more or less pleasant, depending on whether the frequency of the notes are multiples. G (396 Hz) and C (264 Hz) sound perfectly consonant (396 = 1.5 x 264), and give a sensation of satisfaction. Conversely, C (264 Hz) and C# (277 Hz) sound very dissonant, and create a sensation of tension; we'll note that the two notes follow each other on a keyboard. Music could coldly be summarized thus: the art of producing and resolving tensions. The emotions that music provides us take root in the intervals between each note, these intervals are distances measured in "tones."

Music is proportion. Traditionally, compositions are structured around chord progressions, which support melodies. Chords are stacks of at least three different notes. Chord progressions constitute phrases. In their simplest form, chords can be minor or major, depending on the interval separating the first and second notes. A minor chord evokes the dramatic, a major one positivity. Jazz is recognizable among other things by the richness of its chords, with 4, 5, 6 notes, whose emotions are more nuanced, surprising. Music listened to massively today, which we'll call pop music for convenience, is built in its vast majority on three-note chords, triads. Simpler, effective chords, whose interpretation is in a certain way less free. Pop songs are thus more intuitive, sound more naturally pleasant, and provide more immediate satisfaction. When a composer writes a work, they are constrained by a scale. A scale is a collection of 7 notes that gives its color to a work. If in a work, one plays a note that isn't part of its scale, the tension will be such that one can only firmly assert: it's a wrong note, it's unpleasant. The freedom of jazz is to regularly step outside the fixed scale, this is what we call borrowings. For a brief moment, the listener perceives a dissonance that creates tension, stress. This tension vanishes when the musician resolves it, returning to a stable scale through a satisfying interval. The notion of a wrong note is extinguished, everything is just a question of context. It's this excitement that gives this music its thrill. It's this transgression that makes jazz works such colorful and free paintings.

The pictorial equivalent would be a painting by Kandinsky or Miró. It's music that refuses form. Contemporary pop music is in the majority strictly diatonic. That is to say, it refuses to leave the scale, even for a brief moment. We more often associate a pop song with a bright and assertive color. A commonplace is to say that pop is sweet where jazz is bittersweet. This difference is obviously reinforced by the structure of these two genres. Jazz is improvised music, therefore unpredictable. Pop music consists of melodic phrases that we repeat. However, these characteristic differences don't make jazz a music necessarily superior to all others. The reason being that jazz responds to a very specific objective, and pop to another. Pop aims for immediate pleasure, recreation and very often dance. Although originally club music, Jazz becomes in the 1950s a contemplative music due to the fact that it gains in sophistication. Listening to jazz is therefore listening that requires letting go, as before a painting.