When a Pop Singer Becomes a Jazz Pianist...

I was eating avocado with 'nori' seaweed and beer
when there was a TV program of pop singer Kyoko Koizumi.
She was interviewing Mr. Senri Ohe.
To me he is a pop singer.
I would listen to him day and night when I was in my early twenties.
However, according to my bilingual companion who was watching the program
next to me,
Mr. Ohe is now a jazz pianist based in New York.
I was surprised.
And it got me thinking what made him abandon pop music.
This is purely my imagination,
but I thought he had been tired of pop music.
Exactly what about it had he been tired of?
Well, I guess there are zillions of things you can be bored of about pop music.
But the most obvious one is that lack of novelty.
There are certain common denominators,
and most melodies are their variations.
Listeners can expect what's coming next.
If you are producers only interested in cashing in on innocent young consumers,
that may be fine.
But a true artist will find it distasteful.
There is no way of telling why,
but my guess is that Mr. Ohe didn't see any challenge
in producing pop music,
and found greater excitement
in unexpected elements inherent in jazz.
Because jazz is all about extemporaneity, or going with the flow,
where your intuitive reaction, almost like a reflex,
is all that counts.
In my wild guess, that is what brought the former pop singer
to the artistic center of the world,
where serendipity is a daily event.