Nardis.

Developing Taste Against Slop

Nardis is a simple, post-bebop AABA tune with a modal bridge section, augmented seconds, and some traditional I-II-V chord changes. It is haunting.

It was originally composed by Miles Davis¹ and informally owned by Bill Evans, who carried it with him like a talisman even in his final days. During the “longest suicide in history”², he worked with it and it worked him.

The inspiration for the title of the song is a mystery but one anecdote claims Miles overheard Bill refusing to play a song request, saying, “I don’t play that bullcrap, I’m an artist.” In his New Jersey nasally accent, it became “I’m an-artist”, N-artist, Nardis.

But what does it mean to be an artist, anyway?

An artist is someone who has taste.

The Anti-Slop Kill Switch

At this point, it’s fair to say that we’re victims of a vicious assault on our aesthetics. The commodification of attention has crippled our ability and desire to focus and listen intently. The coming of LLMs has made things worse, gushing voluminous amounts of “slop” down our gullet.

It’s easier to define slop in the context of food: some kind of undifferentiated gruel, with a limited taste palate, and very little texture. Everyone eats it, it can even have minimal nutrition, but other than satisfying the basic requirements to be labeled as food, it offers little else. If anything, it ruins our digestion to the point we can’t enjoy other types of food.

This quality appears in content, movies, music, and physical products. It’s sameness and oversaturation, an estrogenic proliferation of the barest utility of entertainment, which is to “enter and capture the mind”. In contrast, the role of “psychagogy” as defined by the ancient Greeks was to lead the soul to a higher — an ideal we no longer aspire to.

It makes sense, then, that if your ultimate goal is to be entertained, you can subsist on content-slop until your belly is full and your brain overstimulated. There’s no question of personal taste, since slop makes everything different the same.

Jazz on the other hand makes the same different. It is a contrafact art. It takes “standards”, popular tunes or songs that are already familiar, and transfigures them during every performance. In doing so, they become “lead” and the artist the alchemist that transmutes it and themselves into philosophical gold. Bill Evans played Nardis from 1959 in “Explorations” through September 1980, the month he died. He nurtured the song and developed it into something new every night. He famously ended his sessions with it, as if every previous tune was doomed to voice lead into Nardis³, his summa perfectionis.

Another key feature of Jazz is that it subverts the very standards it espouses. When Miles Davis was playing heavy bebop alongside Charlie Parker, it was his effort to escape a stagnated sound that made his bebop so special. Not for the sake of being a reactionary but because his own taste as an artist pushed him in a strange, for that time, direction, known and felt by him alone.

It’s in this spirit that we can view taste as the anti-slop kill switch.

Rhythm Changes

One of the first jazz songs I listened to was Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” performed by Bud Powell. I was appalled and fascinated at the same time.

Being classically trained, mostly exposed to even rhythm and clean melodic lines, the microrhythms and rapid key changes, as well as discordant sound, were offensive to my ears. Yet, I kept hitting the replay button for reasons I didn’t understand. Then I listened to Monk’s solo performance and became even more obsessed with it. But it also scared me⁴, to the point I abandoned jazz for many years.

Frankly, it’s an odd thing to say about a piece of music. It’s not the music itself, perhaps, but what it stirred inside me; what it meant to be the person who sought out that particular sound. That’s what great art does: it reveals who we are, even when we don’t want to know.

By the time I came across Nardis, I had spent more than a decade playing baroque and classical music. In the back of my mind, I considered jazz as a minor musical accident, already forgotten and shelved. The contrapuntal quality within the chord shapes of Nardis, however, tinkled a brain already molded by hundreds of hours of fugues, and so I was finally able to articulate, privately, why I was attracted to this musical tradition.

That’s when I knew that devotion was another characteristic of taste. Developing taste begins with listening to your impulses with vigilance and patience. Not in an attempt to grasp and spend them as fast as possible. No, devotion implies a mindful cultivation that takes decades, not weeks, of listening.

Listening is harder than it sounds. It requires time, energy, enthusiasm, and the desire to understand yourself without succumbing to the oppressive nature of the immediately accessible. It’s a process that not only results in self-understanding but self-expansion in the sense that you become more of what you are.

The intention to appreciate what’s in front of you and commit to the necessary labor to achieve such outcome, gives rise to the aesthetic sensibilities that protect your mind from slop; in plain words, you end up spitting it out because you’re disgusted by it in the same way you’re disgusted by floppy, oily French fries.

Fake books

The jazz performer should be able to play along with any new tune as long as they have a lead sheet with chord progression in front of them⁵. A compilation of songs was referred to as a “fake book” because the player could fake their way into a performance of unknown songs. They were often inaccurate transcriptions or bootlegged books the musicians themselves sold. At some point in the 1970s, Berklee students created the “Real Book”⁶, which was more or less an accurate collection of modern and old tunes, with proper harmony and voice leading.

I attempted to play Nardis from Hal Leonard’s 6th edition. As you can imagine, it was a disaster.

I followed the harmonic lines closely, improvising using guide tones and chord shapes, trying to emulate the sound I’ve heard from my favorite performances of Nardis. Everything was, in theory, correct but something was missing. My touch was lacking, my ideas were too neat and predictable, my rhythm swung too much. I tried to make every component perfect, in terms of what I thought jazz is.

It was, in essence, qualityslop.

I believe everyone has experienced the following:

>watches insightful video from an accomplished chef

>personal story about his knives

>mentions metallurgy, history, maintenance

>*next video*

>TEN BEST KNIVES FOR COOKING IN 2026 [#6 WILL FREAK YOU OUT]

There’s nothing wrong with these videos. At least nothing you can immediately point out and say, “hey, this sucks!” They have great production, great lighting, perfect script, they give you exactly what you asked — albeit, with a painfully slow delivery to reach the 10-minute mark. There’s nothing to hate, and so there’s nothing to love in them either. That’s important to understand:

Taste might be about what you love but it's primarily about what you hate.

Unless you can make a choice between two things, not only because you like one better than the other but also because the other option deeply insults you, you don’t have taste but a preference.

Quality slop, content that perfectly overlaps with the expectations of its consumer, to such a degree that the artist's perspective is absent from the endproduct, lacks any discernable edge to captivate or disgust you. It is amorphous yet entertaining⁷.

The unapologetic disembogue of this kind of content from the algorithm into your psyche mutes your instincts because its consumption, over time, fries your taste receptors. Particularly if you’ve switched to the junk food that short form videos are for many people.

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Following the rules perfectly will remove the ineffable components that no one can describe with words or symbols. Playing from the Real Book, where every note is noted and every harmony is written, makes it so that you won’t stray away from what’s in front of you and accidentally discover any personal and special sentiment the song inspires in you.

Artists don’t search for what is but what could be

Recently, the esoteric approach to art, where meaning must be scholastically carved out of the obvious and prima facie impression, is scorned in anti-intellectual circles. The amount of easily-digested music, film, content, etc., has made everything that requires effort and skill to be appreciated appear pretentious and pseudo-intellectual. But being “pretentious” and gatekeeping what you truly value means you have boundaries that shape your taste. If you’re neutral about everything, you’ll inadvertently be preyed on by those who control the market — if all you enjoy is pop culture⁸, then you must admit that it’s not by a natural occurrence of supply and demand but a mechanical manipulation of your taste.

The antipode is the performative appreciation of higher culture, for the sake of virtue by proxy, that results in its degradation. Jazz and classical music have suffered equally from the low-brow movement of caricature masculinists that view everything as a mass of things they like and things they dislike, the hyperideological mouthpieces that sublimate art’s value for political currency, the technotyrrany of productivity that has “best bach for work” playing in the background while they ship another AI wrapper.

Taste goes far deeper than songs and books. Taste informs the way you view reality, it gives you the gusto with which you approach life’s problems and the audacity to reject one view for another because your internal compass is finely tuned with a private calibration unaffected by cultural squalls.

It also creates organic culture around you and your community for the same reasons. In the Soup Nazi episode from Seinfeld, in order to enjoy the famous mulligatawny soup, you must follow the rules set by the cook. He says, “I demand perfection from myself... how can I expect anything less from my customers?” The more we develop taste, the more we raise the standards for the people around us⁹. As we do that, our relationships begin to flourish because we see in others the best in us, and so we can commit the act of devotion, free of debasement.

All Licks, No Music

There’s a saying in jazz that there are no wrong notes. As long as you can punctuate guide tones, resolve strongly, and make clever enclosures you can go in and out of melody or even imply the melody, as you see fit.¹⁰

It is your instincts taking over. From the outside, it looks like random keys getting smashed. From the inside, it feels like you have no time to think about the theory or anything other than the music. When the work is embodied, the gap between the intellect and your fingers vanishes. There’s a spontaneous transfer of information that translates to music, so much so that it feels like you’re being possessed. I believe good players only experience this once or twice every year, while great players live in it.

Evans lost it at some point after LaFaro’s death. His performance of Nardis became frantic, less mysterious, less ethereal. The tempo was too fast, too crass, too bombastic. His lines became predictable because he began reusing them like prepacked modes and licks. He became a copy of himself because he allowed his taste to be automated away.

There’s a conviction in internet culture that everything is permitted as long as it is content. You can become a lolcow, an irony poster, or an outright scammer but as long as you’re entertaining and appealing to the lowest predispositions of your audience, you’re forgiven. You can create divisive content optimized to be as hurtful as possible and still pretend to lead an otherwise normal life because “it’s just content, it’s not that serious”.

Perhaps no one understands how the constant generation and consumption of this kind of content slop creates a second stream of consciousness that slowly erodes who you really are¹¹. It is undeniable that you become what you do, not what you think or feel about yourself, and pretending that you can separate your identity from everything else in your life, whether it’s your job, your relationships, your hobbies, or the things you consume is at the very least hysterical.

Everyone likes the unbelievably hip Bill Evans

When listening to a trio, you can tell when they’re approaching the final crescendo; before the main melody echoes one last time, there’s a musical epilogue, as if the otherwise entropic music begins to dwindle toward a catastrophic implosion.

Looking back at Evan’s life¹², that’s how Nardis must have felt for him. Every time he performed the song, he knew that the end was the start of his performance the next day, again and again. Nardis was the ouroboros; it was never finished, always occurring.

Near the end of his life, he had managed to recapture the undeniable sensitivity and coolness that gave rise to his original work. The sacrifices, the losses, the pain he endured throughout his life resurfaced to join the chorus of a swan song that contained his best and his worst.

Even then, when his body was already spent, the soul endured unscathed. A vitality, a renewed appetite for life in his final hours, and taste — which at this point you must understand is far more than appreciating nice looking things — ignited his essence and burned it down to its wick.

1. Fun fact but Miles Davis worked with three different Evanses: Gil Evans, Bill Evans, and Bill Evans. Each one corresponds with a different period in the artist’s life, showcasing their unique influence on his music.

2. Stated about Evan’s life by his friend Gene Lees.

3. Evans abstained from recording the same songs over and over again, claiming he didn’t have anything else to offer musically, but his drug habit and rising debt forced him to get in the studio more often. After LaFaro’s death, the Riverside label asked Evans to come in and record a solo album, allegedly to get back some of the capital they had invested in him. Orrin Keepnews asked Evans to avoid segueing into other pieces in order to make the “cut” easier in post-production. But the final note of Spartacus’ theme became Nardis, as if it were the dormant melody that enclosed much of Evan’s life and musical offerings. If you’re interested in more anecdotes about his music and Nardis specifically, I highly encourage you to read the magnificent essay by Steve Silberman, titled Broken Time.

4. When Oscar Peterson was asked what his purpose was behind playing with such fervor and virtuosity, he replied, “to frighten all of you.”

5. During the baroque era, basso continuo had the same function. An anecdote claims that Bach was able to improvise extempore the entire ricercar for three voices from the Musical Offering just from hearing the thema regium one time (which is far more impressive than most jazz improvisations). In fact, the strict recital where the soloist religiously follows the partiture wasn’t the only way music was performed before the 20th century. Listen to this performance from one of the students of Chopin, as an example.

6. Story goes that students broke into faculty offices, copying music sheets that were only available to teachers. It’s very likely that they did use some resources only available within the school but as far as we know, the Real Book was a collective effort between students transcribing and sharing notes.

7. A lot of people tried to emulate Evans’ style after his death. The background club jazz you hear in every coffee shop and elevator around the world is a lesser form of the “cool jazz” that he pioneered. It sounds horrifically bad, even though it’s perfect, from a theoretical perspective, and almost identical to his playing... but not quite. Another example is how “bad” cinema gains a cult following while “good enough” movies are forgotten.

8. It’d be reasonable to argue that jazz and classical music were once pop music. Of course, it all depends on the context of the culture at that time. Jazz, excluding the swing era, is music for the musically educated; it takes some knowledge of basic theory to appreciate the artform. But the larger point I’m making is that our culture today has been optimized to such an extent it has lost any sort of audience willing to make even a tiny effort to participate in the creative art by understanding it beyond entertainment. I have no doubts that Mozart would be a popstar today but that’s an indictment of our culture that’d prevent such a singular genius to express his potential fully.

9. There’s an underground speakeasy in the Oltrarno quarter in Florence, called Rasputin. It is said that it was the first speakeasy in Italy (even though it opened in 2016…)

In order to get in, you must find the green door, enter, and ring the bell once. The waiting room is dark and gloomy, with the painting of, I presumed, one of the original owners from the 1920s staring at you with presumptuous contempt. After 10-15 minutes, the host will climb up the stairs and tell you about the rules: no phones, no pictures for the most part, no loud talking between the tables, everyone must order a drink, etc.

The place downstairs is small, barely fitting 40 people at a time, lit with candles and soft lights. Everyone is whispering. There’s an atmosphere of relaxed observance. We sat at the bar and ordered expensive japanese whiskey; after a while, we started talking with the bartenders about the bitters they used, their background, and the history of that place. We learned that recently they’d received a few mixed reviews from tourists like us. Do you know what’s the #1 complain about that place? Too many rules! The bar is literally advertised as a secret underground speakeasy and people were flouting the explicit requirements that originally attracted them there. Removing the barriers to entry doesn’t always result in good things (see Chesterton’s fence)

10. You can even do that in your writing… wink wink.

11. As a counterpoint, it’s worth viewing this phenomenon teleologically. You were always that person and you simply found a way to express latent qualities.

12. I don’t know why it must be this way, perhaps it’s a mere brain quirk making connections where there are none, but I always placed Glenn Gould and Bill Evans on the same axis; examining their parallel lives like Plutarch would do, you find that they had a similar trajectory and fall. Both pianists, both eccentrics, both died being tormented by the same gifts that gave us their music. They brought something unique in their craft and changed the scene — even though the former is somewhat controversial to this day.

When Gould was hospitalized, they say he started screaming in despair knowing that he could never play the piano again.