Exaggerating the demise of jazz

These are times of great cultural and economic transformation. The need to identify what is being lost, or may be lost, is also great. Even greater still is the urgency to try to "save" those things that are most cherished, but that are seemingly endangered.

Venerable critic and jazz aficionado Terry Teachout is concerned that jazz, that great, uniquely American improvisational art form, is on death's door. This is not a new assertion, of course. Aesthetically the decline of jazz is traced to the withering of bebop and the birth of free jazz in the early 1960s.

Or not long after Miles Davis released his classic "Kind of Blue," still the top-selling jazz record of all time at the age of 50. After that, Davis went far off the jazz reservation and experimented with the form in ways that the highly discerning Stanley Crouch, among others, did not appreciate. To some jazz classicists, improvisation goes only so far.

Predictions about the death of jazz have been around longer than I've been alive. Teachout's recent lament, published in the Wall Street Journal, says the dropoff of jazz listening, especially live performances as well as record/CD/iTunes sales, is so drastic that jazz might as well be classified as high art.

And as jazz is democratizing, popularizing music heavily dominated by African-Americans, he doesn't think this is a very good thing at all. Not when it looks to him like it may be repeating the current pattern of troubles in the classical music community:

No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.

But the decline of live jazz clubs has been occurring over the last few decades. Live jazz festivals continue in cities all over North America (and even more so in Europe), even during the midst of recession.

Some of the comments on Teachout's piece are far more optimistic and illustrate the passions of jazz-lovers everywhere. I share those feelings but do have some doubts that the hip-hop generation, as it gets older, will be curious to step back into musical time.

I was raised on rock-and-roll and came to both classical and jazz as a youngish adult, tired of popular culture in general. With the advent of the Web, social communities organized around niche topics are being created and strengthened, and it is these people who will be the future fan base of jazz. The main question is whether there be enough of them to keep the music alive in even a marginal sense to the public.

There are a few promising signs that it might be the case.

A recent addition to the jazz blogosphere, National Public Radio's A Blog Supreme, is a treasure trove for avid fans. NPR had live-streaming of selected highlights from the Newport Jazz Festival. That event may not be what it used to be, but this very well-done site has some serious resources behind it, which is proof that there's a respectable audience for it as well.

There's been a robust debate about Teachout's essay over there too, including a strong reaction from the critic himself. (Here's some more pushback. And here and here.)

Public radio has become an amazing repository of jazz, with an eclectic variety of programming, interviews, commemorations and other resources available on demand. Here's a fantastic collection of jazz-related links available across the public radio spectrum.

Teachout's concern (and he's not alone) is understandable and should not be dismissed as readily as I may have sounded earlier. He's right to worry that the core jazz listening audience, those people who grew up with the music (as opposed to me, who grew into it), is passing on without fully passing down a fond and enduring appreciation of it.

But neither does he consider that the legacy of jazz can be carried on via the Web, and not just through the big-ticket, big-expense methods he describes. In fact, it may be the Web that creates the new listeners that Teachout and the other Cassandras claim haven't been gravitating to jazz since the 1980s.

The younger generations are not immersed in the music of their grandparents -- they're most likely oblivious to it -- but the vehicles for preserving it and keeping it great are multiplying. The potential is there for this to happen.

Sites like this one are just a drop in the bucket. It may be just one jazz blog, just one tiny voice in a cyber-ocean of pop culture swill that increasingly drowns out the good stuff. The birthday of Michael Jackson is being noted across the media expanse today, but thankfully it is well below the radar because of the funeral and burial of Teddy Kennedy.

Perhaps Teachout's point is spot on in this respect, considering that the birthdays of two jazz giants -- Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington -- are left to jazz fans to celebrate. And so we will:

Revival time for film noir?

Documentarian Matthew Sweet, whose "The Rules of Film Noir" is appearing this weekend on BBC Four, thinks so, and he gets Werner Herzog to concur:

“It’s not so much techniques of light or a particular kind of story. There’s something bigger behind it. You recognise a film noir very easily because it’s a cultural mood. . . All of a sudden the financial market unravels and there’s something real deep and sinister coming at us in terms of economics. These times are very fertile ground for film noir. But now, with a depression coming at us, we will see more film noirs than before.”

'A reflection of us in the extreme'

Chris Hedges burst on the public scene in 2002 with his fiercely argued book "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning," which ultimately led to his departure from The New York Times.

In recent years the veteran war correspondent has been turning his polemical rage against American culture. His new book, "Empire of Illusion," is a devastating critique of celebrity worship, among other topics that forms a volcano of derision toward "the cult of the self."

In this adapted excerpt on the Michael Jackson memorial service -- "a variety show with a coffin" -- Hedges advances Christopher Lasch's late 1960s "Culture of Narcissism" theme with a vengeance:

"It was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it concluded with Jackson’s daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl could get a few words out, told Paris to “speak up.” As the child broke down, the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. The crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father."

Hedges puts the blame squarely on the corporate state, which he believes infects most of daily life to an impossible degree. And these corporations do seem to know more about us than we realize, which is why were are inundated with celebrity and "reality TV" schlock like never before:

"We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences for our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught us, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal screenplays. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate to the world and those around us."

His proclaiming the death of literacy -- especially the decline of newspapers and the publishing industry -- is not overstated. If anything, Hedges has come to this realization late, even as he builds an historical timeline that stretches back decades. He's 52, a few years older than me, and having growing up in a television culture, I've never felt part of a literate society.

The print institutions for which Hedges mourns have been dominated by the corporations he loathes, so his thesis isn't entirely convincing. Interestingly, he didn't include in his book a screed lambasting the Internet and blogs as an inadequate replacement for the journalism being lost with newspapers.

But his worry about the intellectual decline that stems from print-based habits, plus an academic industry devoted to churning out docile worker bees trained in "systems management," is especially sobering. The loss of what he calls "moral autonomy" is in full force, because we've given up on studying and employing the lessons learned from the humanities.

Some of the sources for his thesis are books I've also read and been deeply influenced by, including John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" and "Life: The Movie" by Neal Gabler.

Here's Hedges recently on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." This interview lasts about 30 minutes, and he sounds a lot less scorching than he reads: