I started thinking about all of this because of this weird sort of reluctance I had to watch a video I took at a jazz club the other day.
I started thinking to myself, well, why am I reluctant to watch the video? Then, I realized—it's because I don't know the people in it.
Now, of course, you could say that for any musician that anyone's ever taken a video of, but, in this case, it was different. I had the opportunity to be amongst these people—to actually speak to them and try to get to know them in a way that isn't usually possible with the people you pay to see. And what I found was that, I didn't really feel much of a sense of humility in these people. Now, this could absolutely just be me taking things the wrong way, but I felt a sense of arrogance in them that didn't make me want to celebrate their musicianship in any way. And, to be fair, while I've never been the most social person in the world, I'm social enough to know when I'm being excluded from a conversation, or when I'm being walked away from in order to find something more entertaining, I suppose.
And that's fine, you know. I don't need to be spoken to every 5 seconds in order to feel seen by someone, but feeling dismissed by a group of people, however subtly done, is something that will affect the way I perceive them, and that's what ultimately led to me not wanting to watch anything I took from that night. But, again, I could just be looking too deeply into things. Things may very well not be that deep, and my impression of these people could be rooted in something that they never intended for me to feel. At the end of the day, I don't know these people, and, I guess, what I really felt that night was that I was being excluded by a group of people who seemed very inclusive of each other. That is, until, I met Mackenzie and Julian.
Mackenzie and Julian were two people I struck up a conversation with towards the end of the night that I just immediately clicked with. From the moment we started speaking to each other, it was just so clear that we were all cut from the same cloth. We talked on and on about whatever popped into our heads, most of which I don't even remember at this point, but that I know I loved every second of. Out of all the people there that night, they were the only ones who made me feel included and, for that, I'll always be grateful.
If I ever do find myself back at the club, it'll be in the hopes that I get to see them again because, if it wasn't for them, I would've never been saved from the feeling of being completely alienated by my first jazz club, and, for that—again—I'll always be grateful.