Modern policing: rooting out jazz impostors

  Comic from xkcd.

Hat tip to Radley Balko for this one.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all...no.  To the ever-growing list of insults to human dignity we can now apparently add the musical categorization police.

Jazzman Larry Ochs has seen many things during 40 years playing his saxophone around the world but, until this week, nobody had ever called the police on him.

That changed on Monday night however, when's Spain's pistol-carrying Civil Guard police force descended on the Sigüenza Jazz festival to investigate allegations that Ochs's music was not, well, jazz.

Let's put aside, for the moment, that what we call "jazz" is just about the most loosely-defined genre of music there is.  It's like the catch-all bucket for anything that doesn't fit a more well-defined category.  Put aside as well that it is usually recognized as an American art form, and here we have Spanish police passing judgment on an American performer working in this American art form. 

All that aside, we still have here a person who expects full well to be able to call on the state to act as his personal strong-arm, to enforce his own will upon peaceable others, and a state absolutely willing to throw its weight around when nothing that could remotely be called a crime has happened.

Police decided to investigate after an angry jazz buff complained that the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core group was on the wrong side of a line dividing jazz from contemporary music.

The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was "psychologically inadvisable" for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

According to a report in El País newspaper yesterday, the khaki-clad police officers listened to the saxophone-playing and drumming coming from the festival stage before agreeing that the purist might, indeed, have a case.

 

His complaint against the organisers, who refused to return his money, was duly registered and will be passed on to a judge.

 

Let me get this straight:  the fuzz get a complaint from someone whose doctor told him it was "psychologically inadvisable" to listen to contemporary music...and take it so seriously as to "pass it on to a judge" for possible prosecution against a party who had harmed no one?  It sounds like this guy has a fair stack of issues himself;  if this claim is true, it's probably "inadvisable" for him to venture out of his house in the first place.  Among other things, he has just demonstrated himself willing to solicit armed thugs to act in his behalf over an absolutely trivial, nonviolent matter.

On the other side of the playing field, we have (yet again another) example of government agents believing themselves so completely above their lessers that they can swoop in and pass judgment on  any topic whatever, with both authority and jurisdiction.  As if one of the officers entered the venue, heard the band spend six whole measures on the dominant seventh without any substitutions, and concluded that a real jazzer would have at least set up a back-cycle sequence or tritone sub before resolving--God, what's the world coming to?--and wrote 'em up for the judge.

To paraphrase Peter Watts, who has been having his own troubles with overzealous authoritah lately:  in an alternate universe, nobody would think of calling in the state's enforcement goons just because a musical performance wasn't what he thought it would be.  In that universe, the goons might even issue the simple response to such an attempt, "get out of here, we've got enough problems rooting out abuse in our own ranks, without pushing people around over different tastes in music, which does nothing but waste the taxpayers' money and time."

But this is not that universe.  (Boy, is it not that universe.)