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:

At 50, 'Kind of Blue' still resonates

Here are some exquisite excerpts in The Guardian from Richard Williams' new book on "Kind of Blue," which was released exactly a half-century ago this year. It's still the all-time best-selling jazz record, for reasons Williams explains in part here:

"Its increasing success over 50 years has been the result of a wholly organic process, the consequence of its intrinsic virtues and of its special appeal to a particular layer of the human spirit."

What Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and others coming along after the heat of the Bebop period were trying to achieve was to go beyond the raw power -- and I would presume the enormous burden -- of the virtuosity of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, et al. It was, as the headline of the story attests, the quest for something akin to "The sound of isolation:"

"But there had never been anything that so carefully and single-mindedly cultivated an atmosphere of reflection and introspection, to such a degree that the mood itself became an art object. Kind of Blue seemed to have taken place in a sealed environment, with all its individual sensibilities pointing inwards. In its ability to distill its complexity of content into a deceptive simplicity, in its concern for a sense of space within the music, for a unity of atmosphere, and for the desire to create a mood of calm contemplation in which the troubled western soul can take its rest, it has become one of the most influential recordings of our time."

The sound of jazz was forever changed, and jazz traditionalists mark this period of time -- by then both Parker and Billie Holiday were dead, as well as Lester Young, all the victims of drug addictions -- as when the art form lost its way. In fact, many of them remain ambivalent about the influence of "Kind of Blue" while admiring his musical achievement. Williams is clear where he stands:

"The principle of darkness, the sensation of natural light, the element of tranquillity, a heart-piercing beauty, the freedom of the imagination: Kind of Blue has all these qualities, and many more that lie far beneath its seductive surface. Whenever it is played, in whatever circumstances, it provides further evidence that its essence remains undisturbed, a rare example of human perfection, never needing to raise its voice to make itself heard but speaking more clearly as the years go by."

(Update, Aug. 29, 2009: The link to the above story appears to have been taken down from The Guardian site; I have not been able to find it anywhere after first thinking it was a broken link. It did not come up on searches or by scouring through that site. But since the quotes were the heart of this post, I merely removed the link. -- wp)