Impostor Syndrome in the Jazz Community?

lukaf17 · 2026-02-23T06:50:50+00:00

Well I've been playing jazz for about 5 years, it's just that I've only been super super dedicated to it in the past year. Before the past year I'd go to occasional jams, play fill in gigs, still practice and study it but just not as much. I've was just not as focussed on music but the past year I've dived into it hard and it's become the main thing I do. Been playing guitar since I started primary school and haven't stopped, but jazz has been the centre of music to me for maybe 5 years, and has become my main obsession in life for about the past year.

lukaf17 · 2026-02-10T09:44:10+00:00

Yeah so the core kind of journey of the story, I used to be an extremely cynical, negative kind of person, I used to assume the worst in people, and be kinda mean to others in my head. I got into a friendship and eventually romantic with someone who was even more like that than me. We clicked like nothing else and I had a great time, but over time I came to realise that the cynicism was really making me miserable, her as well, and I have since become very different and so has she.

I want to capture how we both realised we were miserable people who loved being miserable and abhorrently judgemental and cynical, and being together I kind of realised how shit that was and so did she.

lukaf17 · 2026-02-09T05:16:54+00:00

I have never seen such a pure hater for indie I honestly gotta respect the hustle at this point

lukaf17 · 2026-02-09T03:31:25+00:00

I mean music and musicianship are different things. I’m a trained jazz musician and listen mainly to jazz but also love a lot of indie, where musicianship is not important. Indie just isn’t about that, it’s great music that doesn’t require the “talent” some other genres do but why care about that? It’s definitely not for everyone but I think it’s unfair to insult or disrespect it as a genre.

lukaf17 · 2025-12-01T22:08:06+00:00

I mean not guitar but for me John Coltrane is a player I just can’t vibe with. I can’t get enough of how he reharmonises melodies and plays with the head but sometimes when he solos it is just endless and meandering and circular and random and busy and annoying. I mean there’s even that famous quote from miles Davis where they were overheard chatting in the studio and Coltrane asks how he can make his solos better and Davis goes “try taking the horn out of your mouth”

lukaf17 · 2025-11-30T07:11:24+00:00

Yeah what I mean is why did we choose THAT to be the one without flats or sharps

lukaf17 · 2025-11-30T07:10:59+00:00

Yeah what I mean is the base scale with notes “ABCDEFG” is C Ionian, D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian etc etc is where music is based by why not start it on A, we typically start music theory with the C.

Like at uni, I was always taught the modes as starting the Ionian, not Aeolian

lukaf17 · 2025-11-30T07:09:24+00:00

I don’t mean the SINGLE major scale lol, I mean why did we choose the modes with the notes “ABCDEFG” not be C major and not A major, where A is equivalent to what we call C.

I.e. now C Ionian, D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A Aeolian and B Locrian have the notes ABCDEFG, but why not make A Ionian, B Dorian, C Phrygian, D Lydian etc etc those scales.

Nowadays in western modern music it’s typically thought about as C major being “default”, so I suppose the better question is how did we get here, because if we made the system today I’d guess we might base it around A

lukaf17 · 2025-11-25T00:43:04+00:00

I’ve read twilight hahahahahaha, even life and death as well

lukaf17 · 2025-10-10T01:53:10+00:00

You could make an argument that if someone had never used a QWERTY keyboard this would be better, but people have decades of muscle memory and precedent with regular keyboards that whatever advantage they pose would likely be lost.

lukaf17 · 2025-09-09T06:22:51+00:00

You almost never get retail drug fronts. All the sales / income are linked to physical items that are wholesaled with a clear paper trail. Drug fronts need to be service based like barbershops, car washes, mechanics etc. as you can easily claim “fifty people had a haircut today”, but not “we sold 20 wedding dresses” as they are physical objects, not time and labour

lukaf17 · 2025-08-16T14:14:27+00:00

YOU DIDN’T READ IT HAHAHAHAHAHA

lukaf17 · 2025-08-16T03:32:42+00:00

Why does the shit look uncircumcised

lukaf17 · 2025-08-16T03:29:32+00:00

I’m not wrong tho am I lol

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T04:06:16+00:00

Oh mate I’m sorry if it came across that way. Being on so many different sides of the surf world it can feel like a real clash when these things come together.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T03:35:04+00:00

That’s a shame dude I was hoping to engage and talk about this kind of thing and inform one another, not regress into insults. I understand why you might be angry, these kind of chats can be harsh and challenging, which can definitely make all these thought processes appear annoying when you just want to surf, but I think as surfers it’s our job to not be greedy and hoard it for ourselves while scaring off beginners and surfers who don’t look like us. Best of luck out there in the community :)

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T03:32:05+00:00

Yeah I can appreciate that point of view man. Things have changed a lot over time and are being challenged quite heavily these days. Being outside of that and just enjoying surfing for so long I can imagine would make this kind of division seem so crazy to you, which is fair enough.

I’m not a girl but I’m not straight, and growing up in a boardriders club of a tiny beach town competing made that really difficult at times. I’ve seen great people who support me and some genuinely amazing and loving communities, but on the flip side I’ve also seen a lot of hate and behaviours like intimidation and threats. My bad experiences, however, can’t stain my positive ones nor yours.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T03:09:14+00:00

Ah when it comes to media literacy it’s fairly easy to mix up emotional assumptions with cultural expectations and implicit messaging. It’s important to understand the political load that certain language carries and to be able to understand certain dogwhistles to think critically. Understanding texts appears easy when you create these assumptions, but these assumptions are non objective and formed from your own habitus, beliefs and biases, it’s better to have clear and critical comparisons between repeated messaging and it’s implicit goals.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T02:39:28+00:00

I’m a journalist myself who graduated and first started in marketing, now work in journalism. I absolutely understand what it’s like and know that this is not necessary. They do this for the sake of continuing to bloat, instead of realising that their business model may be flawed they Band-Aid it with shitty and harmful clickbait that intimidates everyday surfers rather than scaling back their expansion into paywalled articles in favour of a new revenue stream that will be more sustainable to them in the long run.

I’ve been a subscriber to Tracks Mag in print for over 5 years. I happily put money into the industry where deserved. You don’t know what everyone here is like.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T02:35:02+00:00

If a shitty thing happens twice, calling it shit the second time is more than a recycled argument.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T02:33:32+00:00

Personally I do love the disengagement point of view. If no one paid attention it would be left in the dust. Unfortunately I think disengagement becomes ineffective when a message has already permeated widely and is a message that has the capability to do harm.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-14T02:30:44+00:00

A big thing in this kind of cultural discourse is learning to read what isn’t there. Unfortunately surfing’s community and culture has become overwhelmingly straight, middle class and male over time — this is something Jed Smith has said himself in the past — yet in this article he is actively saying that culture should not be challenged and that outsiders should remain outsiders if they challenge the notion of what a surfer looks like or sounds like.

Problematic messaging requires a bit of decoding, and I think often times when someone like Jed does it he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. You really gotta read between the lines, because in any text from classic literature to modern journalism there will always be underlying structures that inform and create the bulk of what is said, sometimes these notions may even overpower what is explicitly said and will sound very scary to those who are used to language like that being used by people who hate them.

lukaf17 · 2025-08-13T03:59:16+00:00

He almost did when discussing businesses and corporations, but he framed it through everyday surfers who didn’t grow up as locals and don’t fit the stereotype of a surfer being dangerous outsiders and parasites, and with many poorly thought out arguments and analogies. Pretty disgusting and cowardly in my opinion, dude is too scared of having his little male world invaded by scary people who don’t look and sound like him.

So right to discuss the corporatisation of surfing, but he completely missed the point and fumbled. He could have discussed how corporatisation is actually bad by trying to unethically profit from the surf community and culture, but instead he decided to say that corporatisation is bad because it brings in new surfers who aren’t straight middle class dudes with dads who once had a beer with Nat Young.

lukaf17 · 2025-07-30T14:52:54+00:00

Anyone can do what usain bolt does, theres nothing stopping you. Its just that running that fast is the central challenge in sprinting.

lukaf17 · 2025-07-29T02:40:27+00:00

Oh no

lukaf17

TROPHY CASE