My response to "Jazz Is Dead (Commercially). Long Live Jazz (Creatively)" by Newsweek
Well as a Jazz artist working on his first album, I find this topic and conversation tired and tiring. Jazz as a pop culture force is indeed dead. The days of Jazz artists being the musical artists to be featured on TV and in films are gone. The days of people coming out in droves to see Jazz artists is gone. I watch Youtube clips of Miles, Coltrane, Herbie, Chick and etc I am often dumbfounded at the amount of people in the audience watching, listening and enjoying. However I don’t pine for the return of those days and I think commentators such as Teachout do.
The genre of Jazz celebrates creativity above hits. I’ll say that again, we celebrate creativity ABOVE hits. Glasper, Christian, Ben, Cohen and etc may never have a hit that will have the mass asking for ringtones but the artistry of their creation will never be in question and that is why Jazz, in the grander, more meaningful sense, is in fact NOT dead. You have to understand that they had to be a trade off between popularity and art. The two can not be in the same room for too long until one HAS TO leave. We’re past the days when a song like “Take Five” will get radio play. LOL. To even think of that in today’s culture is hilarious and it almost makes me wonder how it happened in the first place. Nevertheless it’s clear that at some point someone threw in simple, exploitive, sexual for the sake of being sexual w/o context, profane, angry and, frankly, stupid into the mixture that we call “popular.” Jazz can’t provide these things since it’s insightful, thoughtful, measured, contextual and reaching. So for all the talk about Jazz not being popular, let’s really understand what it would take for Jazz to be popular in today’s world and ask ourselves if that’s what we want of this treasured art?
I don’t don’t blame the world for what it’s become. We live in a hyper, caffeinated society that isn’t interesting in listening to music. How many times have we heard someone say, after “listening” and dancing to a song many times “I don’t even know the words” or “I had no idea that’s what they were saying?” We live in a “as long as it has a nice beat and good hook, I’ll like it” world now. Jazz isn’t about hooks and beats unless the hook and/or the beat serves to advance and tell the story, the feeling, the moment, the thought and/or idea.
I also find it interesting that the writer uses baseball since baseball is a beautiful game (that I’m a big fan of) that is losing fans to uptempo, always moving, more pleasant on the eye sports like Football and Basketball (which I’m also a fan of to be honest). The reasons are basically identical. The hyper caffeinated world in which we live in doesn’t have time to or wants to give time to watching a pitcher’s duel. They want scoring, moving up and down the court or field, motion and etc. Jazz is in the same boat.
So for all these cries about the popularity of Jazz, we need to step back and ask ourselves what it would take artistically and musically for it to be popular in the world we live in today and do we want this great artistic treasure to go down that road. I, for one, say no. Resoundingly. I’m happy that artists in the genre are, for the most part, resisting those who keep wanting it to become popular. I like my Jazz reaching, trying, questioning, observing, expressing and moving forward. I prefer that above popular everyday and twice on Sunday.
Douglas Paul
(forgive the typos)
Posted on December 27, 2009 at 4:36pm | Comments (View)
