Jazz concerts always amaze me. I don’t just enjoy the music, but I also enjoy the interaction among jazz players.

One day I watched jazz performance by Yovie Widianto Fusion Band at Bentara Budaya Jakarta. As I was absorbed by their show, I started imagining… how wonderful if people play their role like jazz musicians, where each of them is given a chance to ‘sing’ with his/her musical instrument. In this way, they can show their improvisations and give their best feats to the audience. The most important thing is that they appreciate each other.

That’s not what we experience in our society, or even in some family. The system in our society has block people’s potential to optimize their capabilities. They are seldom given chance to perform their ‘musical instruments’. For example, in the educational world we know how our Olympic winners prefer to continue their studies in other countries because we don’t show concern over what they need. The same is true in the cultural sector, where Indonesian arts are mostly ignored.

Indirectly, most of them are not given enough room to improve their skills and contribute their best achievement to the motherland. Thus, there is no mutual appreciation. This can also happen to our relations with friends or families, where we often judge and discourage each other too much, without any chance to show our best.

Actually we live in a pop society. In a pop show, the vocalist dominates the other players. The singer gets too much attention while other members seem to act as an adornment. Besides, pop music tends to focus only on profit, not quality.

Our society is like pop musicians. They only follow the prevailing trend, and contribute nothing to constructive development. They just care about looks, while ‘the vocalist’ actually oppresses the rest. And everyone is apparently scrambling for that position.

Pop is so authoritarian, while jazz is so democratic. If our society is like a music performance, then I would like to live in the jazz society :)

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