Jazz listening: Is it about the music? Or is it about the sound?

Yeah, I was thinking Kenny G might be pushing it.

Might explain why you “never really got into them” (your Jazz records) 😎.

That “encyclopedic knowledge” of rock, pop and country that you refer to: I take it you say you have that because you can actually name the vast majority of the songs. That’s because all those songs have lyrics that give away the name of the song. The fact that you “can listen to jazz recordings for hours on end...” - well if that’s true you must like it and it must be pleasing, for whatever reason(s). I have a large collection and I know that, blindfolded, I couldn’t name most of the songs. And my knowledge of jazz isn’t encyclopedic despite being an avid listener and collector for a very long time now. Keep listening and exploring. 

Music is less a taste than a set of learning experiments revealing all along our life a part of whom we are....

I enjoy all music created by a musician first for himself and his immediate family and more than for a market...Classical, jazz, Persian/iranian, Indian, and many others at a lesser degree...

Jazz is less a style of music for me than a "rolling" into one of the composer and the interpreter , like in  singing the oldest fruit coming from the tree of music....Like in Persian/Iranian or Indian music... This intimate relation in improvisation makes them all alike in spite of the differences between idioms...

Written music is the "strangest seeds" from the tree of music....

Reproduced music are the "strangest fruit" coming from it....

Music like language was never about sound but about meaning....

But the acoustical experience of sound in speech and music begins with the first cave where the walking ape meditating to become human create music on a more conscious level....

Music begins to be for him in this cave the art of being together with himself which is also the art of conscious dying or ecstasy.......

Music there wedded with silence....

I apologize for this "dreamed" history of music....

😁😊😊😊😊

@mahgister

I agree with most of your post, but...

**** Music like language was never about sound but about meaning.... ****

I think sound is much more important to music than it is to language.  (Unless, of course, one views sound as part of meaning.)  Humans have created some wonderful musical instruments that produce beautiful, intoxicating sounds.

When I listen to someone speak, I rarely focus on the sound of their voice.  I focus on meaning.  Unless their voice is:

strange enough to be distracting, or;

wonderful enough (as with a friend who is a professional voice man for audio books) to be mesmerizing.