Jazz and the silent majority

[Quarky]

I was quite intrigued by this "Jazz chart" posted on All about Jazz which offers an alternative view to the more Euro-centric picture of jazz given on the BBC. The reason for posting is simply the shear number of records in the list which could be described as "jazz mainstream." It makes quite fascinating reading:-
.

There are a few observations I could make on your analysis, Ian, but I'm not sure they would be helpful.

However Rosie and Shirley of Nerija made an excellent (but brief) critique of Jazz as it is perceived by the public and Jazz as perhaps it ought to be, in order to appeal to the younger folk, and those people naturally sympathetic to Jazz. About 38/39 minutes in on last night's Jazz Now. With which I was in complete agreement.

There are lots of factors governing what a US radio station might play. We can't really compare that with UK stations, since we only have BBC, as noted, and Jazz FM, where Frank Sinatra and Diane Krall might come close to the top.

[Ian Thumwood]

There are a few observations I could make on your analysis, Ian, but I'm not sure they would be helpful.

However Rosie and Shirley of Nerija made an excellent (but brief) critique of Jazz as it is perceived by the public and Jazz as perhaps it ought to be, in order to appeal to the younger folk, and those people naturally sympathetic to Jazz. About 38/39 minutes in on last night's Jazz Now. With which I was in complete agreement.

There are lots of factors governing what a US radio station might play. We can't really compare that with UK stations, since we only have BBC, as noted, and Jazz FM, where Frank Sinatra and Diane Krall might come close to the top.

Oldball

The obsession with trying to appeal to a youthful audience is a double edged sword. It is noticeable that the audience for jazz seems to be getting older and I can remember having a lengthy conversation with a girl who organised a festival in Belgium about 15 years ago where she stated that it was really difficult to attract younger people to gigs by the likes of Sonny Rollins who was playing later that night. Part of the problem seems to be that people consume music differently these days with CD sales crashing and the integrity of the listening public wanting the instant hit. There is even a sense that music is almost disposable with so much available as downloads. I was fascinated to see that the over-rated pop group U2 are intending to tour the music from an old album this year, no doubt due to commercial pressures.

The issue which is most salient is that jazz is a it's best when it is divorced from commerciality yet the music is struggling to compete at the moment and probably fairing worse than other oeuvres. The idea of "product" seems to prevail and the message in the UK seems to always suggest that a new spin on jazz always seems to be necessary to make the music appeal. However, the play list on the "chart" was interesting to me as it was suggestive that more authentic types of jazz could still hold their appeal.

[Serial_Apologist]

Oldball

The obsession with trying to appeal to a youthful audience is a double edged sword. It is noticeable that the audience for jazz seems to be getting older and I can remember having a lengthy conversation with a girl who organised a festival in Belgium about 15 years ago where she stated that it was really difficult to attract younger people to gigs by the likes of Sonny Rollins who was playing later that night. Part of the problem seems to be that people consume music differently these days with CD sales crashing and the integrity of the listening public wanting the instant hit. There is even a sense that music is almost disposable with so much available as downloads. I was fascinated to see that the over-rated pop group U2 are intending to tour the music from an old album this year, no doubt due to commercial pressures.

The issue which is most salient is that jazz is a it's best when it is divorced from commerciality yet the music is struggling to compete at the moment and probably fairing worse than other oeuvres. The idea of "product" seems to prevail and the message in the UK seems to always suggest that a new spin on jazz always seems to be necessary to make the music appeal. However, the play list on the "chart" was interesting to me as it was suggestive that more authentic types of jazz could still hold their appeal.

I'm very much in agreement with the late John Stevens in that I always think the reason for this to be that jazz prepares us for a different kind of society, one not dependent on the instant hit (as in drugs hit) as an escape mechanism for the ego-driven conformism consumer capitalism needs to keep the machine competitive: turnover and change as dictated by publicity. Jazz is basically a collective form of music making - not just in its classic New Orleans period or for that matter with the emergence of free improv as almost an alternativist approach questioning commodification (the pavement art principle that it's gone the moment it's played, unless recorded), but in the interdependence of solo improviser and accompaniment, in which, for the best results, each reinforces the other, and the interdependence of performers and audience, who form a community for the duration of the performance, is a form of celebration that embraces the capacity for response at every level, emotional, physical, intellectual. This is the case even where the soloist is endeavouring to extend his or her range and vocabulary as a means of self-realisation, in terms of putting the whole of himself or herself into the act or creation, and even when this is in a cutting session situation: while this may superficially seem like a fight for recognition in a crowded market place, each player is in effect egging the other on. And lastly, there is the aspect of complexification that seems as endemic to jazz as it was to 20th century modern classical music. Innovators may try to simplify the idiom in some quest to rediscover an imaginary purity stolen when African culture was shipped off and suppressed, but the imperative, as represented par excellence by Bebop, was to show the white parent culture that in the quest for justice, equality and non-discrimiation, black musicians could can challenge acknowledged harmonic and other formal sophistications and pretentions to progress, but do so on our its own terms. Modalism, which initially seemed like a return to simple linear scales and a way of escaping the elaborations (read baggage) of chromatic expansion, eventually found itself too, undergoing the kind of complexification that parallelled Euroclassical modernism - you only have to hear late Coltrane to experience his advance into more atonal territory, urged on by the inherent language evolving in his improvisations. Something similar then happened within Fusion in the 1980s with Steve Coleman and the M-Base people. Jazz is a sensitive barometer of its times. If jazz's evolution appears to slow down, or feel some compulsion to turn back, this may be a signal that progress, indeed civilisation, has ceased moving forward.

To conclude, its almost as if to authentically reflect on and replicate the complex consciousness necessary for psychological survival in the modern age, music has itself to become more complex; and there will always be those who cry, enough! - and try to start all over again: Minimalism being such an example. Yes, Minimalism originally had complexity in mind if one thinks of Steve Reich's early instrumental phase pattern pieces; but its complexity is in but one aspect of music's organisation, the rhythmic, and we see that the need (for whatever reason) to reintroduce a harmonic angle, without resort to audience alienation, results in re-adoption of what had previously been consensually seen as outmoded procedures - these in turn returning music to conventions of cadence, tension and release which negate any pre-existing innovatory potential, which at the same time bringing the music by Reich, Glass, Adams and other post-minimalists more in line with the tacit musical values tied with commerce-ability.

That's my angle on it, anyway, for what it's worth!

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I think that the "problem" with jazz is that it almost doesn't need marketing. Most people are going to come to the music by means other than something being hyped up. The hype issue generally originates from people who don't understand their customer. Tell someone that "x" is the greatest new talent, most jazz fans will turn up to listen and then probably disagree. They are more likely to want to do their own exploring to arrive at discovering something new.

I don't think that capitalism is totally to blame either as most people are too lazy to want to explore other forms of music. Ask most people what they like to listen to and it will be very mainstream as they are unlikely to have been inclined to explore outside of their comfort zone whether it is contemporary pop or Radio 2. People do not want to think about music and if there is a nice, nostalgic option like the U2 concert I referred to , this is all the better. You almost feel that jazz would do better fending for itself and not relying on marketing , especially when , in some case, the people doing the marketing actually know very little about the music. About 6 years ago Jazz A Vienne wanted to celebrate 30 years of the festival and chose to do this with a carnival which had various floats but absolutely nothing to do with jazz. The concerts that night were cancelled to make way for this event which had no appeal to the tourists rocking up to attend a jazz festival! There is a subtle difference in marketing by making something interesting as opposed to marketing something by hyping it up. My argument is that the genuine jazz audience are savvy enough to always gravitate to the "real" jazz. Because there are so many micro-niches in jazz, the audience is a wide spectrum and a highly critical one. I think that a "broad brush" attempt to make it more appealing to a wider public is always bound to fail. You need to target more specifically and at more credible acts. It would be better to let a younger audience discover the music themselves rather than marketing something a slick PR machine with a vested interest believes they should be listening to. I really feel that the jazz audience is underestimated by the people marketing the music. Sometimes the way jazz is promoted is almost an insult to your intelligence. The chart was interesting because it seemed to demonstrate that there was an (American) audience savvy enough to know what good jazz was irrespective of the hype. If you like, my initial post is suggestive that the American audiences are pretty much switched on to what is not a cop out / over-hyped / not genuine even if you might want to suggest that most is well within the mainstream even if this mainstream is broad enough to cover so many styles.

Regarding your comments about Bebop representing the originality of "black culture", this was reflected in jazz from the off. Labels like "Black Swan" were promoting this idea in the acoustic recording era even before you get to the music by the musician par excellence who typified this - Duke Ellington.

[Serial_Apologist]

SA

I think that the "problem" with jazz is that it almost doesn't need marketing. Most people are going to come to the music by means other than something being hyped up. The hype issue generally originates from people who don't understand their customer. Tell someone that "x" is the greatest new talent, most jazz fans will turn up to listen and then probably disagree. They are more likely to want to do their own exploring to arrive at discovering something new.

I don't think that capitalism is totally to blame either as most people are too lazy to want to explore other forms of music. Ask most people what they like to listen to and it will be very mainstream as they are unlikely to have been inclined to explore outside of their comfort zone whether it is contemporary pop or Radio 2. People do not want to think about music and if there is a nice, nostalgic option like the U2 concert I referred to , this is all the better. You almost feel that jazz would do better fending for itself and not relying on marketing , especially when , in some case, the people doing the marketing actually know very little about the music.

[...]

Regarding your comments about Bebop representing the originality of "black culture", this was reflected in jazz from the off. Labels like "Black Swan" were promoting this idea in the acoustic recording era even before you get to the music by the musician par excellence who typified this - Duke Ellington.

Ian, as regards your observations on jazz audiences, you may well be right. Jazz is, par excellence, an example of a product of capitalism (it wouldn't have come about but for how capitalism structures relations between people) that heralds capitalism's demise, given optimal conditions. This is why I would claim that jazz will remain stuck in terms of its own capacity for innovation and advance as long as it fails to acknowledge which side it is on. It will tend to get a fillip from the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, unless its continuance becomes more dependent on the kind of perfectionism, of crossing uncrossed T's and dotting undotted I's, that marks an overemphasis on the academy at the expense of knowledge and wisdom acquired on the stand.

I think there was something of a schismatic parting of waves back sometime in the 60s, maybe on both sides of the Atlantic, when followers of the music in general split into those who stuck with jazz up to its latest manifetations, so long as these fitted styistically broadly within an extending Hard Bop idiom at times verging on Freedom without going the whole hog, as did Coltrane after Love Supreme - and in this broad category (dare I say) I would include Charlie Mingus, together with much of Andrew Hill's work in that period as well as Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isle, and Sam Rivers' albums under his own name; a much larger potential following of mid- late-teenagers who transferred allegiance to what was then called R'n'B with remnants of jazz, i.e. Graham Bond, Zoot Money, Brian Auger/Julie Driscoll - some of whom followed through to its Fusionist consequences, i.e. Ian Carr's Nucleus, Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Paraphernalia, Mike Gibbs, and the "rockier" ends where Freedom treated with post-Hendrix amplification/feedback/ring mudulated Rhodes keyboards etc., as in Soft Machine and its many offshoots, but less so Jazz Funk whose appeal was more to a black socially aspirant youth than Reggae's alternativist associations with marginalisation and police oppression. Finally there was the tiny coterie that still has its devotees () including among erstwhile classical avant-garde/experimental/performance art exponents and devotees who, at their most purist, held that jazz lost any pretentions to progressiveness by sticking to outdated formal procedures (not just playing standards), soon lost faith with Minimalism as it sought legitimacy among the new fashion-mongers. Those of older generations that had always considered jazz to be the sophisticated end of chart entertainment along with Sinatra, now bemused by black radicalism and the apparent absorption of jazz within either rock and roll or modern experimental art music, retreated, as used to be said of the old man on first hearing Ornette, to their Charlie Parker (and Stan Kenton!) records.

The next generation to come of age with the so-called BritJazz Revival of the early 1980s, (I put it a few years earlier than the publicised advent of Andy Sheppard, the Loose Tubes and the Jazz Warriors), were those attracted to something post-Punk that was less to do with image, let alone acquiring the "necessary techniques", and more with the standing of radical musics carrying their own critiques by way of stylistic pluralism, a radical early form of multiculturalism. Thus you found Lol Coxhill, one-time jazz outsider who had mixed with the Canterbury lot before being championed by The Damned, being treated as a sort of elder eminence grise to the newer, less puristically hidebound advocates and promulgators of Freedom. To these followers, Andy Sheppard promised the use of his own commercialisation to engage with a younger generation unfamiliar with/to jazz by taking them on a journey from the deliberate simplisms of his first LP ("A") into more advanced sophistications, eg that duo record with Keith Tippett "66 Shades of Lipstick"; and for a time the majors that were still majors complied.

But, like all gifted jazz musicians who have to make a living, the Andy Sheppards of this world cannot wait for the socialist revolution that had been the assumed future for the 1960s generation. The world that moves diametrically in the opposite direction may well be able to accommodate a sophisticated alternative to a classical world of creativity that has lost sense of its potential, sui generis, to expand the means of artistically communicable experience musically, and has to refer to a globalist-mediated version of universal brotherhood and sisterhood of unsustainable consumption, dominated by pan-global interests centred on ecocydal exploitation of unexpendable natural resources with the support of political apologists who more and more exhibit all the knowhow of not having a clue what to do about the consequences.

The question as to jazz's future will depend, as has been pointed out re other musical genres, on the disseminative powers of the new social media and what these mean in a society where an equivalence is to be drawn between the knowledge downloadable on Google! at the click of a mouse and the same action's capacity for making or breaking a national or international currency in "wrong" hands, somewhere out there in "cyberspace".

Sorrry if this all sounds too gloomy!

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

At the end of the day, "serious" music is effectively a form of problem solving. People will always be asking musical questions and challenging what is or what isn't possible and, in my opinion, this will always prevail even if for a tiny audience.

I have always thought that it is pretty stupid to love one style of jazz but detest another. There are some kinds of jazz that I am not too enthused by but it is a broad church and I struggle to see why people can't like Jelly Roll Morton and Evan Parker or Duke Ellington and John Hollenbeck. There is a richness of music out there if you are willing to explore yet the issue in 2017 is that there is increasingly a willingness to do this and the people marketing the music would prefer that any "jazz choice" is made from an increasingly limited gene pool. I struggle to see that the 1960s was a culmination in what jazz could be and certainly, whilst freedom did present challenges and possibilities , its all part of the vocabulary now. As I have said many a time, it is the jazz composers who seem to have the keys to the future. Wonder if you had checked out the Mark Dresser lip I had linked to on the other thread?