As I get older I am aware of the importance of the concept of romanticism – not just within jazz, but within life. Romanticism is more than the “act of being romantic” – it is an optimistic view, perhaps naively, of the world. When I think of the concept a hopeless romantic, what is it that brings to mind? A dreamer – someone who concentrates on the positive and forgets the negative in things. A person who creates a unrealistic view of something in their mind. Someone who can find beauty in a place or thing because of related associations or experience.
What romanticism entails is that brilliant optimism of life, flying in the face of reality and the doldrums of existence, regardless of what science or realism might offer. It is an insistence that the world is good and beautiful even when it appears not that way to others.
One must assume that if the romantic is seeing things in this light, differently than anyone else, his view must be incorrect, or at least irrelevant to most people. Obviously if ten people sit in a room and nine believe the walls are blue, they probably are blue irrespective of what the 10th person would say. So what is this “vision” of beauty and righteousness? Surely it is incorrect, but it certainly exists. In this way the romantic notion becomes abstracted from its object; the rose glasses are removed and inspected.
I believe this romanticism is as real as the rose glasses are. They are pure beauty and optimism – so pure that whatever is passed through this romantic ideology comes out more beautiful, more comforting, more loving and hopeful than ever would have been seen in reality. These romantic glasses are truly awe inspiring.
Can we describe these glasses, this conversion of the everyday from average to wondrous? We can try with words. But these concepts are difficult to find proper definition buckets with which to hold them. Music is the closest analogy, because music can be both the interpreter and the interpreted. It is, in fact, the process of turning life into beauty.
