Zelda & Jazz: it really works

Up until recently, I had a dear friend named Ray who was really into jazz. Ray was in his 80s when I knew him, and as a result, he was a bit of a gateway to Brighton in the 1950s. 1950s Ray really loved jazz, and 2023 Ray was there to tell me about what it was like to love jazz in Brighton back then. It was a town of cider bars for the most part, as Ray told it, but underneath a lot of bars were jazz venues, all literally underground, and the greats from the whole world of jazz would come and play in darkened, smoky rooms in this strange town stuck on the chill edge of England. This was always done under assumed names, which was something to do with managers and payments, I gather. The important part: you had to be in the know to access any of this.

I thought of Ray earlier this week when I got an email about a new jazz record that’s appeared on Spotify and probably other places too. I don’t get sent a lot of emails about jazz, which is surprising given what an unbearable hipster I continue to be, but this is a record called Zelda & Jazz, by The Deku Trio, so it slipped through. A pause here for that name: The Deku Trio. Anyway, here is a series of “forward-leaning arrangements” of classic Zelda music originally written by Koji Kondo. I’ve been listening to it all week, leaning forward, as have 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 together so well.

Let’s add upfront, this subject is something my colleague Edwin has already covered much more intelligently than I’m about to. The scattered, freewheeling piano of Breath of the Wild is distinctly jazz-like, and, as he argues, it’s a brilliant guiding hand on the player’s elbow for wherever a scattered, freewheeling game might take you. If you’re only going to read one article on Zelda and jazz today, gosh, go and read that one – it’s a wonderful piece of writing.

But beyond all that I keep thinking of Ray and jazz as he encountered it, jazz as an underground experience you had to be in on. And I think about the one jazz show I’ve been 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 this show, listening along, and realising I was absolutely not in the know. Have you ever listened to music you don’t really understand in public? People were applauding at what seemed to be completely random moments. People were nodding at one another and blithely acknowledging events that I had not even spotted as they occurred. After a while, my ignorance, while shameful, became kind of thrilling too. I felt like an explorer out in a distant nebula, encountering some kind of physical field that my senses could not reliably confirm.