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Jazz and the Perfect Storm

Jazz’s flowering in the twentieth century seemed to mirror America’s spectacular ascendancy from a settler society to Madeline Albright’s “indispensable nation.” Titanic figures such as King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman seemed to echo what America itself was doing in trade, commerce, and finance—setting the agenda. As jazz burst onto the world stage in the early 1920s, New York eclipsed London as the global financial center, the American dollar became the standard in global trade, and Hollywood began its dominance of the cinema. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, Americans were enjoying the highest standard of living in the world, sustained by conspicuous consumption and consumer choice, a model that was adopted by countless nation-states around the world. It was with good reason that the twentieth century was dubbed the “American Century,” with hopes expressed that the new millennium would herald the “Second American Century.” But those hopes were rocked by 9/11, unsuccessful military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the near collapse of the banking system that had underpinned America’s growth and prosperity. The financial crisis that began on Wall Street in 2008 and subsequently engulfed the rest of the Western world presaged a global recession whose ramifications have been predicted to last a generation. As the American government grappled with the enormity of its domestic problems, the National Intelligence Council cast its gaze toward the horizon and came up with their global trends review, published every four years, this one entitled A Transformed World. It concluded that the United States was now becoming a less dominant power and that the global system was moving toward a multipolar world, representing a dramatic shift from the “unipolar moment” the United States had enjoyed following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the two decades of unchallenged American supremacy that followed.

The speed of this transformation had been astonishing. Whereas the elder George Bush had been concerned about the possible collapse of Russia, the younger George Bush had been concerned about excessive Russian power. Emerging markets, such as China, India, and Brazil, now accounted for 40 percent of the world’s economy and were challenging American dominance in key areas such as industry, trade, and finance. Yet while America indisputably remained a great nation, it was no longer a nation at ease with itself. It had seen a decade when the news media frequently reported on the polarization of American politics, from the House of Representatives to the Senate in Washington, DC, and out into in the red and blue states, where the divide between conservatives and liberals on issues such as abortion, faith teaching, single-sex marriage, foreign policy, and the size of the state seemed irreconcilable. Even the once iconic symbols of America’s greatness were being put in the shade. The tallest building in the world was no longer to be found on the Manhattan skyline but in Dubai, where the Burj Khalifa stood more than half a mile high. The largest casino was not in Las Vegas but in Macao, the biggest movie industry in the world was no longer Hollywood but Bollywood, and the world’s biggest shopping mall was now in Beijing. Lists like this are, of course, arbitrary, but it is striking that in the 1990s America topped the list in all of these categories. But this was not about American decline so much as the rest of the world catching up. It was a scenario that was finding resonance in the broader arena of global realpolitik. In his influential study The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Power, Michael H. Hunt concluded, “The time for U.S. hegemony may have passed. As the relative U.S. advantage in economic might and cultural appeal slips . . . the core U.S. cultural model—a faith in unending corporate-driven growth and the unending delights of consumerism—may be fading at least in the developed world. Western Europe and Japan have drawn alongside the United States in their technological capacity, their income levels, their capital resources and the depth and integration of their home markets. They need no longer look to the United States in these areas.”1

Equally, in the world of jazz, the time for American hegemony seemed to be passing, with countries no longer looking to the United States for inspiration, direction, or a model of correctness. Not that this troubled most American jazz musicians and audience members, for them it was business as usual. As ever there was great music to be heard, from established stars to dedicated young professionals trying to establish themselves in a highly competitive music arena. The center of American jazz activity remained New York City, which, as bassist, composer, and blogger Ronan Guilfoyle noted, “May well be the best place in the world for jazz music—at least in terms of there being more great musicians in one small concentrated area than anywhere else on the planet.”² And although Guilfoyle pointed out that “[in] terms of seeing great creative music, NY is hard to beat,” he sounded a note of caution, asking at what cost this was to musicians: “The money that can be earned there from playing creative music is risible, and outside NY it just gets worse and worse.”³ Very few musicians engaged in the Big Apple’s jazz economy would argue with Guilfoyle’s assertion, but if adequate remuneration had become one problem facing American jazz musicians, then falling audience numbers was another. Yet those who attempted to highlight issues such as these often found their words unwelcome, un-American even, and likely to be shouted down—“Jazz has had more than its share of hand-wringers,” thundered the New York Times when concern was raised at the results of the 2009 National Endowment for the Arts survey on audience participation in the arts, which revealed that the audience for jazz, especially among younger fans, was in decline.⁴

Times were changing, and changing fast. In today’s world of fast-evolving information technology, young people have an unprecedented range of entertainment choices available to them, and, given the portability and sophistication of smart phones and tablets, it is entirely possible to go an entire day without being deprived of commercial entertainment for a single second. The easy availability and desirability of popular culture for the majority represented a serious challenge for jazz. Space was fast shrinking in newspapers and magazines for jazz features and reviews, jazz radio was in steady decline, there was a gradual winding down of jazz activity by major recording companies, and empirical evidence suggested that jazz audiences appeared to be in decline. “Culture is never static,” one American observer blogged, arguing, “Music is a cultural artifact, and the culture has moved on. Jazz has moved on as well, further and further from being ‘popular music.’”5 It simply served to highlight how times had changed since jazz’s Golden Years in the 1950s and 1960s, when the music seemed to reflect the optimism and drive of America’s military, industrial, financial, and cultural ascendancy. So if, as the National Intelligence Council suggested, the American nation was confronting a “Transformed World,” how was American jazz responding to these challenges?

It is no exaggeration to say that the United States has felt the impact of the 2008 banking crisis more than any other nation. In 2010, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that a majority of Americans had been affected by the subsequent recession, which “brought a mix of hardships, usually in combination: a spell of unemployment, missed mortgage or rent payments, shrinking paychecks and shattered household budgets.”⁶ Young adults, especially those trying to enter the job market, were especially hard hit according to the Brookings Institution, which predicted that the road to recovery would be long and could be “rocky for many Americans.”⁷ The economic climate inevitably impacted on the leisure dollar, as jazz pianist and author Ted Gioia cautioned in 2009: “That big elephant in the corner of the jazz club that no one is mentioning is our current economic recession. Even in the good times, the jazz world seemed to be on a shaky financial footing, but what will happen [now]?”⁸

As if in answer, some six months later the New York Times ran a feature headlined “Doomsayers May Be Playing Taps but Jazz Isn’t Ready to Sing the Blues,” reporting a “robust, lively and engaged” crowd at a jazz gig in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that it considered representative of “almost any given night on the New York club scene.”⁹ On the face of this anecdotal evidence, jazz seemed to be weathering the financial storm well. But as Jared Pauley, adjunct professor of history and music history at Rutgers University by day, and an active pianist on the New York jazz scene by night, pointed out: when you cross the East River to Brooklyn and enter Williamsburg, “You experience the bitterest portion of the NYC musical market. Ask most musicians how much money they make playing in Williamsburg. Large majorities of people that reside in Williamsburg are notorious for not paying covers or giving support when the money bucket comes around. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon to encounter people splurging on fifty-dollar bar tabs. Where do musicians fall in this wacky game of musical chairs?”10 Stated simply, those outside the musician’s community had little idea of how hard it had become to make a living from playing jazz music in the new millennium. Yes, the public and the journalists who wrote about the music were aware that jazz was a harsh taskmaster, but few knew—or even wanted to know—about the nitty-gritty details of the “business” of jazz, such as how much a musician took home after a night’s work. After all, most people who patronized live jazz events did so in the expectation of an evening’s entertainment. We’ve all had our share of problems, so who wants to hear jazz musicians’ hard luck stories? Besides, the jazz world had experienced difficult times before, but the musicians always seemed to luck it out. So no wonder some commentators had become inured to “Chicken Little laments” about the future of the music.¹¹ But Bob Belden, saxophonist, arranger, composer, producer, and Grammy winner who graduated from the jazz program at North Texas State University before moving to New York in the 1970s, had observed the popularity of jazz ebb and flow in the Big Apple for almost forty years. “Looking at ‘the scene’ today, it’s not what it used to be, as it should be,” he observed. “All of a sudden there are too few professional choices for musicians and there are way too many musicians working for door money.”¹²

The growth of gigs where artists play for a share of admittance money, or “door money,” instead of an agreed fee—or even worse, where artists pay a club, a bar, or a restaurant to perform in their space—was making it increasingly difficult for musicians to generate an adequate income stream from playing jazz exclusively, making it necessary for many to supplement their income stream with other lines of work. This form of concealed subsidy effectively underpins the American jazz scene and some national scenes abroad, such as in the United Kingdom. But while this is something that is hardly unknown in other branches of the arts—for example, artists who earn the main proportion of their income as college art teachers or writers whose income comes from teaching literature or “creative writing” courses—it simply serves to underline the equivocal position of jazz in the music marketplace. Critically acclaimed composer and arranger Darcy James Argue, leader of Secret Society, a critically acclaimed big band that performs his original works around New York City, reflected on the citywide scene as he saw it: “Jazz musicians are accustomed to scrabbling, but dwindling freelance opportunities plus disappearing venues, scuttled ventures and changing music policies have all contributed to a scene where it’s not uncommon to see world class musicians fiercely competing for the privilege of playing pass-the-hat gigs.”13 Even the TV and press coverage given to the closure of the Tonic in 2007, a small jazz club on New York’s Upper East Side, made no mention of the fact that most artists who performed there had done so for a share of the door money.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, musicians are reluctant to talk about their finances, thus presenting recurring difficulties documenting the “business of jazz” in contemporary times, since an apparent discrepancy or lack of proportion has emerged between, on the one hand, the elevated, high-toned rhetoric of the creative act, and, on the other, a pragmatic accommodation to contemporary circumstances. However, as saxophonist Mark Turner has pointed out, “In New York competition for work is very high. Here it is very difficult to make a living, it’s pretty hard. But when you reach a certain level you are able to find work in Europe, and I would say for me, most of my playing, about 75 percent, most of my income is from Europe. If I had to earn it in New York, forget it. I work in New York, of course I do, with my band, different bands as a sideman, we all do that, and some great music, yes, but most of my income comes from Europe.”¹⁴ It is a view echoed by pianist Craig Taborn, who says, “There are a lot of places to play and do the stuff we do, but over time it’s a struggle because it’s super expensive here. Nobody is really making their money gigging in New York, that’s not really where they are making their money—they are making money doing music but a lot of people teach, or they do other things.”¹⁵

New York resident Andrew Collier, in West View News: The Voice of West Village, was one of the few to comment on the unusual paradox whereby “New York [may be] home to the world’s best and largest jazz scene, [which] caters to the world’s audiences for jazz, [yet] in one of life’s twists, many musicians earn a big chunk of their daily bread touring overseas.”¹⁶ The reason for this was simple, he explained: “Clubs pay musicians as little as $25 per performance and players often fight over non-paying gigs in small bars and clubs. Such vicious competition creates an inhospitable lifestyle for professionals.”17 This despite the fact that New York is home to a lively, year-round tourist trade: “Drop into the famed Village Vanguard Jazz Club on Seventh Avenue and you’ll usually spot a group of Japanese tourists sound asleep in the corner,” continued Collier.

It’s not due to the jazz—which is the best in the world—but the tremendous jet lag due to the 12 hour time difference between New York and Tokyo. Visit most of the great jazz clubs of New York and the Village such as Blue Note, Smalls, Iridium and Smoke, and you’ll find at least one-quarter and sometimes as much as half of the audience consists of Japanese, French, Italian, Swedish and other overseas tourists . . . There’s no doubt New York’s global jazz fans are a boon to the club market in New York. In 2010, the city hosted 8.5 million foreign tourists. Meanwhile, 16 per cent of New York University students are from abroad, a total of 8,000 students, forming a core audience for the Greenwich Village jazz clubs like Blue Note, La Lanterna, and Le Poisson Rouge.¹⁸

So where do all these tourist dollars go? Not, it seems, to the jazz musicians who play the New York jazz clubs and venues. As Ronan Guilfoyle has pointed out, “There are just far too many musicians in New York for it to make any sense on an economic level . . . the abundance and availability of musicians and the lack of places to play drive the price musicians can charge for NY gigs down to below subsistence levels. It’s a buyers market for the clubs and the musicians suffer.”¹⁹

Yet historically, it has always been difficult for young musicians to establish themselves in jazz. Established players look back on their younger days with affection, as one of making financial sacrifices and struggling to find work before eventually establishing a reputation, a period euphemistically referred to in the jazz world as “paying dues.” The internationally respected guitarist and ECM recording artist John Abercrombie has sustained a successful career in jazz since the 1960s, and in the new millennium years was on the faculty of the State University of New York at Purchase. It provided him with a unique vantage point to reflect on the days when he was establishing himself in the jazz business and on the challenges the young musicians he teaches face today:

Well, there are so many players today, there are more players now than when I was coming up, but there’re still no more gigs. It’s terrifying. There’re all these good musicians and there’s no place to play, and a lot of my students wind up playing in these restaurants and they make $20 a night or something. I made $20 back in the 1960s. How can you live on that now? Back in the 1960s things were a lot cheaper—you could buy food—and if you made $100 a week, you were on top of the world. Now $100 a week will keep you in cigarettes. I don’t know how they’re going to make it, so I always tell them, “You really have to want to do this music because you love it. Sometimes I have a hard time working in this country, and if I have a hard time, you may be up against a wall.” So I try and be realistic with them, and I think they find that out pretty soon when they get out and start working, they see that there’s not much there.20

Yet the heartening thing was that young musicians continued to emerge who were committed to the music and despite college loans and escalating accommodation costs were prepared for financial sacrifice and supplementing their income with a wide range of work, often remote from their musical aspirations. But it was not easy, as a thoughtful piece by Patrick Jarenwattananon on National Public Radio’s A Blog Supreme highlighted:

Picture a jazz musician. Perhaps he’s sharply dressed, standing in a corner of a restaurant, a small but appreciative audience looking on. He seems to be lost in the moment; wrapped-up in a passionate solo, his eyes closed in intense concentration. For over an hour, he is thinking of nothing more than emoting into his instrument with all the present force of his conscious being. You may pause to ask yourself: Is this really his job? You know, how did he pay for that nice suit and the $6,000 vintage saxophone? Does he have a family, a landlord, a mortgage? The $15 I paid to get in, multiplied by the 60 people in the room—can he really support himself with the small cut he takes when the pot is finally settled-up with the venue and the other musicians?²¹

Musicians who run their own ensemble often top-up their sideman’s fees and travel expenses from their share of the gig money in order to keep the show on the road—the alternative being a cooperative arrangement whereby all band members share expenses equally and split what is left over among them. In today’s brave new world, if musicians want to release a compact disc they usually have to bear the recording and manufacturing costs themselves. And with compact disc sales at an all-time low through downloading on the Internet, sales are accumulated incrementally mostly at gigs, half a dozen sales here, a dozen or so there, and on a good night, twenty or more at a time. Effectively, the compact disc has become an expensive business card, used to send to promoters, club owners, festival producers, and animators in the jazz business in the hope of generating work. And although many musicians use social networking sites to announce gigs, mini festivals, and album releases and to post videos on YouTube in the hope of broadening their audience base, it presents a lifestyle that might be sustainable for a single, dedicated young musician prepared to hustle and go without in the short term, but may be unattractive to some in the longer term.

Would these young musicians want to be hustling twenty-five- or thirty-dollar gigs when they had a partner and maybe family commitments? It was a quandary that confronted the brother of the late Lester Bowie, trombonist Joe Bowie, known to jazz fans for his band Defunkt. He pointed out that sacrifice and paying dues as a young man were accepted as a way of establishing a reputation, but this kind of lifestyle had become difficult and almost impossible to sustain with family responsibilities.

As I approached fifty I realized I had two options, to succumb, because you just get tired, you gotta survive. Eventually I would have had to go punch a clock somewhere and be satisfied to do an occasional gig, do that, or place myself in an environment that will support me so my voice can ring out. I used to be able to make a living playing in New York, but it’s impossible now for myself and lots of other musicians who are not “mainstream”—like the Wynton Marsalis clan. I think it is almost impossible to make a reasonable living—$50,000 a year, not a fortune—unless you’re a mainstream artist, so you must sacrifice a certain level of your creativity. You should be able to lead a decent middle-class life, struggling, but own a home, own a car, and raise a couple of kids. With your wife doing another job, that should be enough. But most of my friends in New York have gone into university and become teachers to survive. Why should I teach every day if I’m a performer? I think the long-term consequences for jazz in America are devastating.

Bowie’s answer was to move to Europe to pursue his calling. “What’s happening in America now is clubs disappearing, alternative venues are disappearing, we’re looking at a future of TV-dictated culture. It fails to acknowledge the great inspiration that jazz—and art—has on other fields. Doctors, mathematicians, scientists—other people who are not musicians—gain so much inspiration by having alternative culture to experience, and without that, where will America be?”22

Clearly there is a need for precise empirical data on how the American jazz economy functions, and in 2000 the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned the Research Center for Arts and Culture (RCAC) to undertake a study to examine the working lives of jazz musicians. The resulting report, “Changing the Beat,” painted a picture of a highly flexible workforce that earned less than expected given their high levels of education, with only modest institutional support from state regional arts agencies and nonprofit foundations. In 2011, the “Money from Music Survey” presented a snapshot of nearly nine hundred performers’ earnings in the first comprehensive assessment of jazz musicians’ earnings in the United States since their “Changing the Beat” survey eleven years earlier. Among their findings were the following insights:23

~Jazz musicians have more formal education than most musicians, play many different roles, and have simpler support teams than musicians in other genres.

~The mean gross estimated music income for jazz musicians who took the “Money from Music” survey was $23,300 for a non-AFM member. On average, jazz musicians made less money than classical or other musicians who took the survey.

~A higher percentage of jazz musicians surveyed have graduate degrees than was the case a decade ago.

~Jazz musicians are getting less airplay on terrestrial radio than they did a decade ago.

~Surveyed AFM members are making 15 percent less than they were a decade ago, while non-AFM musicians are making 15 percent more.

In conducting this survey, the RCAC acknowledged that acquiring information was difficult: although the jazz community was relatively small, it was difficult to reach comprehensively. “A lot of musicians just won’t make time to tell us how they are doing financially,” said Jean Cook in 2011, one of the managers of the Future of Music project. “They’re too busy making a living.”²⁴ Nevertheless, while a survey of almost a thousand jazz musicians may not be perfect, it does represent a reasonably representative sampling, the kind of numbers that might be used, for example, in a media telephone poll in a city or state. Even allowing for the margin of error inherent in such surveys, a typical annual salary in the range of $20,000 to $27,000 will come as little surprise to those engaged in the American jazz economy. Inasmuch as the survey revealed that jazz musicians enjoy “more formal education than most musicians,” how long will jazz students continue to regard jazz as a viable career option when their peers, with degrees in vocational studies, put their qualifications to work in better remunerated areas of the economy such as accountancy, law, engineering, medicine, architecture, pharmacy, or financial services? In June 2008, the Norwegian saxophonist Frøy Aagre completed a five-date tour of the East Coast with a US rhythm section and expressed her surprise at the poor level of remuneration American jazz musicians received, even at relatively well known jazz venues: “I wonder how long [young jazz musicians] can survive on the kind of money they do and how long students with big ambitions will keep on spending a fortune on jazz education that probably will result in a full-time teaching job with badly paid gigs on the side?”25

If the financial reality of the “business” of jazz in New York City presented a picture that was causing some observers concern, the national jazz scene presented an equally mixed picture. As the New York Times pointed out: “Live jazz is hard to come by outside of a handful of major cities,”²⁶ reflecting the erosion of jazz’s core audience in the United States. It was a point echoed by Ronan Guilfoyle: “The U.S. jazz scene, as a national scene, is almost non existent,” he blogged. “Apart from NY there are some scenes of reasonable size in a few places—Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and maybe a few others. But all these pale into insignificance beside the bloated New York scene. . . . What you have in the U.S. is one huge scene with far too many musicians and no money and a series of cities, often with over a million people in them, with virtually no scene at all.”²⁷ Outside New York, dedicated jazz clubs were usually found in major centers, and then there were usually only one or two, blogged jazz educator Kurt Ellenberger: “This means that there are (if the club books groups seven nights a week) only 30–60 possible engagements available each month. The rest of the work is casuals (weddings and parties), which tend to be clustered on weekends and holidays. . . . With the thousands of qualified musicians in any major center, it’s easy to see how an oversupply of labor combined with diminishing demand have worked to keep fees near where they were in nominal dollars thirty years ago.”²⁸ In Philadelphia, for example, Mark Christman, executive director of the critically acclaimed Ars Nova Workshop, a not-for-profit organization that promotes an ambitious program of creative music at their weekly jazz and experimental music concerts, says that the desire for musicians to perform is as great as ever, but the opportunities for them to do so are getting harder: “Jazz clubs in this town are few and far between,” he says. “Bars where you can have a drink and listen to live music come and go across the city and offer a place where people can play and, yes, those people are playing for the door. The state of the local musicians, in local cities outside of Chicago and New York, is one of near poverty.”29

The one area of the jazz economy that does make real profits is jazz education, an industry that has quadrupled over the last twenty years. But even this buoyant sector of the American jazz economy was rocked when the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) unexpectedly filed for bankruptcy a matter of weeks after its 2008 convention. The IAJE was a forty-year-old organization whose annual conventions brought jazz educators together from around the world, so news of its unexpected demise caused the kind of reverberations in the world of American jazz that the failure of Lehman Brothers would cause in the financial world just a matter of months later. However, within three months the Jazz Education Network was formed to fill the void, holding its first annual convention in 2010 on the campus of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, with 1,250 people attending performances, clinics, and panel sessions. Bob Sinicrope, a teacher at the Massachusetts Milton Academy prep school and a board member for the Jazz Education Network, claimed that their inaugural event was something of a miracle, “a testament to how badly the people who were working to mount this thing wanted it to happen.”³⁰ Each succeeding year saw a growth in attendance, with the 2012 conference held in Louisville, Kentucky, drawing more than three thousand delegates. Yet even though an important event in the American jazz calendar was making a comeback, one troubling question would not go away—why had the huge expansion of the jazz education industry over the last two decades not seen a commensurate rise in jazz audiences? At the 2012 conference, the Jazz Education Network held multiple sessions that focused on The Jazz Audience Initiative. This was both a valuable and a comprehensive analysis of audience demographics of those attending jazz concerts at several major venues across the United States that was commissioned by the Jazz Arts Group in Columbus, Ohio, and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Among the findings from the Jazz Arts Group Multi Site Survey of Current and Prospective Jazz Ticket Buyers, June 2011, were these:³¹

~Demographically, jazz ticket buyers across the 19 communities are middle-aged, predominantly male, and very well educated. On average, only 17 percent are under age 45, and 80 percent are white.

~Younger buyers are significantly different than older buyers, suggesting generational shifts in participation patterns and music preferences.

~Jazz buyers want to move [to the rhythm of the music], suggesting a strong kinetic association. When asked what kind of jazz they like, a third of all buyers indicated they like jazz that . . . “makes me want to tap my toes and dance,” while 31 percent said they like jazz that . . . “makes me think or challenges me in some way.” Women are very different from men in this respect, with women prioritizing jazz that makes them want to move, and men prioritizing jazz that makes them think. Older buyers 65-plus prioritize the sentimental aspects of jazz “that takes me back to another time or place.”

~By a wide margin, jazz buyers prefer informal settings for live jazz shows, especially clubs and lounges. Younger buyers have an especially strong affinity for informal settings.

~Results illustrate the generational shift in technology use amongst younger music consumers. Three quarters of all buyers in the 18–35 cohort use social networking websites, and 68 percent stream audio from the Internet.

One key finding of the Jazz Arts Group survey served to re-emphasize was the fragmentation of the jazz audiences into what might be called different “taste markets” (see paragraphs two and three). To all intents and purposes, there seems to be an absence of a general jazz audience who will turn out for a jazz performance irrespective of genre. Yet, since jazz discourse (for example, in jazz magazines) largely tends to treat all taste markets equally (with the possible exception of smooth jazz), it might be expected that a greater degree of musical curiosity and willingness to cross over into other genres might result, producing a more robust market for the music. One concern might be that less patronized taste markets will succumb to the homogenizing effect of the marketplace, and since cultural consumption determines cultural production, they may become commercially unviable to promote. However, the main cause for concern revealed by the survey was that on average only 17 percent of ticket buyers were under the age of forty-five. This served to underline the findings of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study on arts participation in the United States published in 2009. For anyone seriously interested in, or concerned about, the arts in America, the NEA survey results were troubling, especially in the realm of jazz music. Briefly, there were two areas of concern. The first was an analysis of the Median Age of Arts Attendees across a wide range of artistic activity that included jazz, classical music, opera, musicals, nonmusical plays, ballet, and art museums (this latter category representing both art galleries and museums). The survey covered the period from 1982 to 2008 and discovered that the audience for all types of activities studied in the survey were aging, but it was the change in the jazz audience that was striking. According to the survey, the average age of a jazz event attendee in 1982 was twenty-nine, but by 2008 it had increased to forty-six. Between 1982 and 2008, the average age of a jazz event attendee in the United States had increased by seventeen years, as compared with five years for opera, six years for musicals, and seven years for art museums (or galleries).

The survey also revealed that while older fans broadly continued to follow the music, the appeal of the music to American teenagers and twenty-somethings had declined between 1982 and 2008. This conclusion was bolstered by the NEA’s findings for “Cultural Event Attendance for People between the Ages of 18–24.” Except for art museums, all the aforementioned categories showed a decline, but it was the drop in jazz attendance that again caught the eye—a shrinkage of 58 percent between 1982 and 2008. Once again, even allowing a generous margin for statistical error, the conclusion remains indisputable. American jazz appeared to be losing its younger audience, prompting a feature in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Can Jazz Be Saved?” While it offered no solutions to the problem, it commented, “It’s no longer possible for head in the sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or its future looks anything other than bleak.”32

So what was the answer? The traditional response to lack of audience support in a cognitively demanding music like jazz had been the cry “education,” the argument being that teaching young people about jazz through grade school, junior high school, and into high school would help to build a sustainable audience for the future. The sustainability aspect of audience-building is important, since it means attracting people not just to replenish the ranks of the older generations of jazz fans but also to grow the audience base at the bottom, among younger people. Thus, the theory goes, by exposing students to jazz in the younger age range you will be creating an informed group of young people, some of whom will go on to support the music during and after college and so help grow that crucial audience base.

Since the late 1970s, when jazz education began to be rolled out across the United States, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on jazz education, in colleges, universities, summer camps, and high schools:33

~More than 500,000 high school and college students were involved in jazz activities.

~Over 500 colleges were offering jazz-related courses for credit.

~More than 70 percent of America’s 30,000 junior and senior high schools had at least one stage band or jazz ensemble.

~There were approximately 300 summer camp programs that included jazz.

~Approximately 250 school jazz festivals were being presented each year, some attracting as many as 200 school ensembles.

You might expect that with the subsequent growth of jazz education—by 2012 there were more than 120 American colleges and universities where students could major in jazz studies³⁴—the problem of replenishing the jazz audience at the lower age scale would take care of itself. But that has not happened. As we have seen, the NEA’s survey found the audience for jazz in America to have dropped by 58 percent between 1982 and 2008 among young people—the key sector that it is hoped would become audiences of the future. Even allowing a margin for statistical error beyond those customarily used in consumer surveys, the $50,000 question confronting jazz educators was: Why was there so little correlation between engaging with the music as students and going on to support the music when they got older?

What seems clear is that there is no Alexandrian solution to this particular Gordian knot. Yet while the answer to building a sustainable audience for jazz among younger people might be elusive, there is, perhaps, some value in exploring possible reasons for this, since it is an issue that might have commonalities with jazz scenes in a broader, global context. An interesting place to begin might be the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Culture,” in which she expressed her concerns that market forces would lead to the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment. She wrote: “To believe society becomes more ‘cultured’ as time goes on and education does its work is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumer society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances because its central attitude towards all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.”³⁵ This argument, that the logic of the market eventually annexes all areas of cultural experience, has some force: by the new millennium, the entertainment principle had been so taken over by the corporate need to generate profit that, in Arendt’s forward-looking words, “culture [was] being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”36 The desire to be diverted, entertained, and provided with a form of escapism had, by the new millennium, changed out of all recognition from the cinema—the first true medium of genuine mass entertainment, which had been born in the early twentieth century. With the power and commercialization of the Internet, the commercially constructed “popular” tastes of the majority had never been easier to fulfill via lap-tops, tablets, and 4G smart phones with instant Internet access to “the popular”—pop music, pop videos, computer games, and social networking sites—with the result that popular entertainment now occupied the dominant cultural space in young people’s imagination.

In a society where consumerism and the mass consumption of popular culture are the predominant leisure-time pursuits, popular culture studies have become en vogue with students in colleges and universities, where the faculty members argue that their classes enable students to “deconstruct” and think critically about mass entertainment. This embodies the employment of certain relativist values that have gained widespread influence in cultural circles today and that set the context in which culture is communicated, debated, and funded. These relativist values contend that conceptions of the truth and morality are not absolute but relative to the people holding them. However, critics of relativism argue that when the truth lies in the eye of the beholder, when there is not one truth but there are many, forming a consensus around what ought to constitute standards of excellence becomes impossible. If all perspectives have equal validity then a limitless plurality of values is indistinguishable from no values at all. Yet to argue this point invites the relativist response, “That is your view” or “That is your opinion,” which denies the possibility of reasoned argument that attempts to claim some things in life may have greater aesthetic merit than others. Indeed, there is a growing belief in cultural studies that any suggestion of higher cultural values is a denigration of mass taste and the preferences of the man in the street by invoking elitist values. The ideology of consumer choice means that the only acceptable indication of value is consumer demand, so any attempt to give the public something that might be considered somehow “better” than what some have argued represents the lowest common denominator of taste is considered “elitist.”

Elitism has become a highly pejorative charge, implying that something that is far too demanding to be popular (such as jazz) is therefore alien and aloof from people’s lives, a line of argument that relativism’s critics contend is permitting an uncritical embrace of the ordinary. Clearly then, relativism, and the arguments that flow from its ethos, are not without controversy. The authority that culture once commanded is now treated with skepticism, since the conventional distinction between high and low culture makes little sense if the truth is relegated to the status of one person’s subjective opinion.

Alongside relativism in the congested court of popular opinion lurks the weasel word “instrumentalism,” a practice many feel is eroding the value of arts in Western culture. When a government adopts an instrumentalist approach to art and culture, it means that they treat knowledge and culture as a way of realizing a wider practical purpose: thus universities and colleges are promoted as being vital for “economic progress.” It is not knowledge in itself, or ideas, or art, that is valued, but their utility in helping to achieve economic growth. It is rare for politicians to be forthcoming about the role of instrumentalism in their government’s policies lest the charge of philistinism be laid at their doorstep; however, one of the most unapologetic expressions in its favor came from Baroness Tessa Blackstone when she was minister of state for the arts in the United Kingdom. Her words bear repeating. When asked, “Can the arts be more than frivolous, trivial, irrelevant?” she responded they could, but only if they could be used for purposes other than aesthetic ones.37

As a result of instrumentalism being adopted by most Western governments, many have argued that the development of literary or artistic studies is no longer a priority for educators and that instrumentalist pressure on knowledge production has meant that art and culture are not valued by criteria internal to themselves but by their utility to serve wider practical purpose—such as contributing to a nation’s gross domestic product. So while great art—such as jazz—is still produced, society finds it difficult to value it on its own terms. As Arendt has pointed out: “Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present and past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they were only there to fulfil some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or low order.”³⁸

The inter-relationship between relativism and populism, whereby the former provides the rationale for the latter, has seen the media, cultural institutions, and educational bodies falling over themselves to appear relevant, accessible, and in touch with popular opinion and quietly desperate to avoid any charge of elitism being waved in their faces. There is a distinction to be made here between the popular and populism; the word “popular” in many languages denotes not only that which is successful but also that which belongs to the “people” as distinct from the elites. Thus American studies scholar Ray B. Browne argues: “In a democracy like the United States, [popular culture] is the voice of the people.”39 Thus the popular represents the generality of taste or opinion and derives from the people, for good or ill, while populism is giving the people what they seem to want or are deemed to want, believing it is good for them. This has seen “entertainment” in all its forms now promoted as culture, with the newspaper industry eager to serve the needs of populism, conscious of falling sales through the pressure of free news portals on the Internet. Since “relevance” and “accessibility” are usually communicated in the media via popular culture, generous coverage is afforded to pop, rock, and film—pop music is especially useful as a tool for appearing relevant, since it provides an entry point into the affections of the young. In contrast jazz is perceived as being too demanding to be popular and thus is alien and aloof from most people’s lives and so elitist—and is becoming increasingly marginalized in the print media by the extensive exposure afforded popular culture.

It is interesting how the views of academics such as Krin Gabbard seem to reinforce the populist notion that jazz is elitist. In The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences he writes of how the music will be ultimately claimed by “the sequestered world of professionalism.” This world, he claims, will “establish autonomy most effectively by creating a metalanguage and a series of methodologies that close out the amateur. Anyone can engage in evaluation and express an opinion about a book, a play or film. Only a professional can speak a language and brandish a paradigm understood only by a small coterie of specialists with mastery over the same language and paradigm.”⁴⁰ As the distinguished critic Max Harrison observed after reading Gabbard’s words: “It will be no use in the future, then, for us to complain we have not been warned.”⁴¹ Mass culture theorists would need little evidence beyond Gabbard’s assertion about jazz being “understood only by a small coterie of specialists” to demonstrate that the music was remote from the majority of ordinary people’s lives and thus elitist. Gabbard’s aspiration to sweep jazz appreciation into the closed shop of university research—where, as Harrison notes, “the rest of us will be able to watch, albeit only from an ignominious distance”⁴²—might simply confirm younger audiences worst fears about the music—that it is so remote from their daily lives it is marginally more enticing than a barium enema.

From time to time, jazz has been harnessed as a soundtrack for commercial TV advertising, which, according to Gabbard, testifies “to the music’s rising cultural capital.”43 It is a response that might be argued by advocates of populism to be exclusionary and elitist, since Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” was not used simply to sell an automobile but to sell a luxury German production car; Dinah Washington’s “Mad about the Boy” did not advertise a brand of jeans but a designer brand of jeans; Sarah Vaughan’s “Make Yourself Comfortable” did not tempt you to buy ice cream but to indulge in an expensive brand of ice cream; and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” was the soundtrack of an advertisement designed to persuade you to buy a brand of private medical insurance. One striking early success of this technique was the use of Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” which was used for a perfume advertisement—not just any perfume, but Chanel No. 5. A similar argument might be leveled at a series of advertisements that appeared in the jazz press for expensively clunky wristwatches modeled by jazz musicians and jazz-influenced singers for the kind of people who think the roulette tables of Las Vegas are glamorous. In examples such as these, the populist might argue that the people to whom the sales messages were being directed were the mature executive class and higher wage earners that could afford the goods and services being promoted. Thus the populist might claim that these advertisements present jazz as appealing to a privileged coterie of monied liberal elites (the haves) at the expense of “the people” (the have nots), and as such were at odds with the current populist aspiration of inclusion. “Evidently,” noted Harrison, “the Western world’s ultimate ‘validation’ of culture arises from its adaptability to selling goods and services on television while intellectuals like Gabbard . . . stand on the sidelines, cheering.”⁴⁴

The institutionalization of populism and antielitism in the media, politics, public life, and institutions of government and commerce has prompted some critics to argue that we are losing alternatives to mass popular culture, such as jazz, because popular culture is imbibed consciously, unconsciously, and effortlessly through the TV, audio, and digital portals that surround us all. It is a climate in which author Andrew Ross felt able to claim in his book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture that “today a code of intellectual activism which is not grounded in the discourses and images of popular commercial culture is likely to be ineffective.”⁴⁵

The culture of the United States may be many things to many people, but most would agree that it is overwhelmingly that of a consumer culture, which is about the continuous creation and accessibility of goods and services that are presented as new, modish, faddish, or fashionable. It is a culture predicated on the pursuit of the “always new,” since if a product or enterprise does not keep reinventing itself, it is swept aside by something newer, bigger, or better. As Arendt has noted in connection with the entertainment industry, “[It] is confronted with gargantuan appetites, and since its wares disappear in consumption, it must constantly offer new commodities.”46 Thus in the broader cultural context of the United States, the pursuit of the always new is in tune with the American people’s consumerist aspirations, while, in contrast, jazz, which has shown no significant evolutionary change since the 1970s, is no longer considered reflective of the always new and is thus out of tune with America’s consumerist aspirations, and has come to be regarded as a cultural artifact remote from the day to day. It has meant that the majority have come to regard jazz in the context of the broader realm of American culture and the arts, and, like opera, ballet, and classical music, it is something to be “appreciated” rather than “enjoyed,” its essential verities remaining largely static, like those of classical music or fine art in a gallery.

Perhaps this is one of the unintended consequences of the “Jazz Wars” of the 1990s, when an attempt was made to place swing and blues at the heart of jazz’s meaning. In the past there had been a sense that jazz was a work in progress, and that the act of defining the music had the effect of limiting it. Thus for many jazz music was simply music that was taken to be jazz, offering a degree of flexibility that underlined the fact that the music was both a cultural and historical creation but still subject to change and evolution; it had to do with how the music was framed, thought about, and used, rather some mysterious element the jazz possessed that other genres did not. Claiming that the essence of jazz lay in a swing and blues component, although well intentioned, would, over the course of time, have unforeseen consequences. Swing and blues were elements that were central to the ritualistic and social function jazz played in urban black communities, when jazz was a shared culture and an expression of black engagement with modern life that articulated the experience of collective identity based on implicit notions of musical roots, authenticity, and community. This reading of jazz places its core values in its Golden Years, ambiguously located between the turn of the twentieth century and the mid-1960s. A line of reasoning was adopted by some that if the music moved beyond the shadow cast by the tradition of jazz’s founding fathers, for whom swing and blues were integral to their music, it surrendered its meaning as jazz music, becoming something else.

Thus in claiming jazz as an exclusively African-American form, it became a means of asserting both cultural identity and of placing a specifically African-American art form at the center of American cultural life. These were highly laudable ambitions. But attempting to create a set of cognitive principles to define jazz’s master narrative and unite the jazz community around them had its idiomatic strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, it was the weakness of these arguments that had the effect of undoing these rationalizations after the fact. The very act of drawing inspiration and identity from a sense of connectedness with jazz’s Golden Years had the effect of narrow-casting the music and setting in train a perception that, among other things, jazz was a mirror held up to American society through which to contemplate their sociocultural past. As a result many casual followers of the music came to think of the more traditional sounds of jazz of the 1950s and the 1960s as “the real jazz,” and they tended to reject more experimental forms of the music as not being jazz at all. This tension between the prescriptivist view of jazz by those who are loyal to history and the descriptivisit view of jazz as an inclusive music whereby jazz remains current by adapting musical elements from beyond the music (as it had traditionally done throughout its history) surfaced in an Internet posting when the distinguished trumpeter Nicholas Payton blogged: “The very fact that so many people are holding on to this idea of what Jazz is supposed to be is exactly what makes it not cool. People are holding onto an idea that died long ago.” He concluded: “I am Nicholas Payton and I don’t play ‘the j word.’ I play BAM.” 47

Prompted by Payton’s posts, the inaugural BAM (Black American Music) conference was held in New York’s Birdland Jazz Club in January 2012, where Payton, with others, reaffirmed that they no longer played jazz but BAM. The panel theorized, according to The Philly Blog, “that black audiences have largely turned away from the genre because of the word [jazz] itself.”⁴⁸ Among the panelists was Orrin Evans, a pianist and recipient of a Pew Fellowship for the Arts award, who explained, “It’s the image, not the music. The name is limiting audiences.”⁴⁹ In other words, what these artists appeared to be claiming was that they believed audiences had come to associate the term “jazz” with certain performance practices associated with the past that were prejudicing the acceptance of more experimental forms of the music in the present. The panel not only theorized that the j-word was an impediment to employment but also went further by concluding that the j-word now had racist connotations, prompting The Philly Post Blog to headline: “The Word ‘Jazz’ Will Now Be Racist.”50

In an attempt to bring jazz closer to the mainstream of American life, trumpeter Christian Scott came up with the descriptivist term “Stretch Music,” meaning he wanted to stretch the definition of jazz beyond the prescriptivist definitions of the music through inclusion, explaining that he and others were attempting to “encompass as many musical forms, languages, cultures as we can.”⁵¹ Pianist Robert Glasper also broke ranks with the true believers with his album Black Radio, steeped in R&B, funk, rap, electronic sounds, and guest artists such as Erykah Badu. In a telling interview with the LA Times, Glasper said, “The jazz community kind of kills the alive to praise the dead. You look in any jazz magazine, 90 per cent of it is old people, reissues or people who are gone already. The other 10 per cent are new people when it should be the opposite way. [In] jazz we’re so stuck on the old days, and then we get mad when there is no new audience. Well, why do you think there’s no new audience? You’re still playing [stuff] from 1965, that’s why.”⁵²

Jazz, it seems, has gradually become deposed in the eyes of the general public as an essentially forward-looking movement by more enticing distractions elsewhere in popular culture, which appear better suited to reflecting the desires, instincts, feelings, and aspirations of young audiences. As vocalist and educator Alison Crockett has pointed out, it has ceased to be a typical musical experience for most young people, since they are listening to what they and their peers believe is hip, cool, and of the moment: “Drake, Rhianna, and Beyonce. They’re black. That’s where they’re going,” she says. “This music is part of their lives on a daily basis. It’s on their iPods. They listen to it on YouTube. It’s on the Disney Channel. It’s in Church and school. It’s the music playing at the ice-skating rink and the music they dance to in their dance classes. Music outside of that is ‘special.’ Music that you are told about in school for an assembly; your parents take you out to see to enlarge your cultural perspectives.”⁵³

On his blog Jazzwax, Marc Myers, author of Why Jazz Happened, noted: “Jazz is increasingly considered passé by young American audiences . . . [The term] has finally become the kiss of death—code for ‘you’re going to hate this music.’”⁵⁴ These connotations are not lost on young jazz musicians. For example, in a review of the Paradigm Studios four-part television documentary Icons among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense, Will Layman noted: “Musicians talk a great deal why they don’t much care for the word ‘jazz,’ they talk about why they won’t be, why they can’t be, entirely confined by the history of the music, and they assert with conviction that the truth and beauty of the music ‘is now.’”55 These musicians are striving for contemporary currency, conscious that in the eyes of a broader public, it is something the music has lost. Yet despite these young musicians’ best efforts to portray the music as of the present, the perception of jazz is increasingly one of historical endeavor, an image that is becoming increasingly difficult to shake off. “When the word jazz is used in the media—as it was [recently] in a New York Times headline—the story once again was about an artist who ‘overcame heroin and prison,’” blogged Myers. “[This] tired drugs-and-jail storyline, though dramatic, isn’t helping.”⁵⁶ And certainly through the years jazz has had to battle this stereotypical imagery, no doubt helped into mainstream consciousness by Hollywood films such as the 1955 motion picture The Man with the Golden Arm. Yet that image has much basis in fact. The bop years were also jazz’s drug years; for example, on May 29, 1957, a New York Post headline screamed DRUG ROUND-UP NETS 131 IN 24 HOURS. Three paragraphs down, the page detailed the arrest of John (Jackie) McLean, twenty-five, of 284 E. Houston Street, for “felonious possession of an ounce of heroin.”⁵⁷

Alto saxophonist Jackie McLean was far from alone, however. James Lincoln Collier has noted: “It is probable that 50 to 75 percent of the bop players had some experience with hard drugs, that a quarter to a third were seriously addicted, and that perhaps as many as 20 percent were killed by it.”⁵⁸ But that was then and this is now, and despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of young jazz musicians are straight-arrow professionals, the myth of jazz-musicians-who-do-drugs and the hipster culture they inhabited has proved hard to shake off. It has not been helped, argues educator Kurt Ellenberger, by jazz education, which, he claimed, was stubbornly adhering to a stodgy conservatism. This, he believed, was hopelessly mired in romantic notions of the Golden Age of jazz, circa 1950–60, a decade, he pointed out, that had been reified by many performers, critics, and academics for a variety of legitimate reasons. Nevertheless, he wrote: “Here we are, a half century later, and jazz musicians continue to foster the attitudes, behaviors, and sometimes even the hopelessly worn-out hipster lingo from that bygone era. While I’m sure this is emotionally comforting as subculture signifiers, to the outside world, this nostalgic indulgence must appear archaic, comical, and desperate. Jazz and its affectations certainly aren’t ‘cool’ anymore, and haven’t been for decades; these signifiers no longer identify the user as a slick, modern, and rebellious hipster.”59 This failure to acknowledge that jazz long ago lost its counterculture appeal as a means of symbolic resistance to bourgeois hegemony simply reinforces the impression that the music and its culture are more of the past than of the present. It suggests that there may be some advantage in jazz educators portraying the music in a more contemporary context at preschool, grade school, junior high school, and high school level, and with less emphasis on the history and connotations of the hipster lifestyle, which, however romantic, has long passed. After all, young students are more likely to identify with jazz’s young stars of today, who are very much alive, rather than with photographs of jazz’s deceased heroes—however exalted—staring back at them from the pages of a history book. Yet to suggest this prompts nonaesthetic anxieties and concerns, since educators feel obliged to invest the music with the reverence and seriousness it is due by treating it as a historical endeavor, and so reinforcing the very stereotypical image jazz is trying to shed beyond the hallowed halls of learning.

In 2002, Billboard magazine’s annual Year in Review feature pointed out how vocalists had “exploded into the top 10 of the jazz charts, selling better-than-respectable numbers and infusing the jazz world with hope.”⁶⁰ However, it also cautioned that this new-found hope had prompted “many to ponder the fate of the unsung heroes behind the vocalists, namely the instrumentalists. Even as jazz vocalists were moving to the foreground of the record buying public’s consciousness, it seemed that instrumentalists were losing ground.”⁶¹ Five years later, again in its end-of-year review, Billboard reflected that “jazz is one of the great instrumental genres but, in 2007, albums recorded by singers or featuring impressive line-ups of guest vocalists, commanded the charts.”⁶² By now it had become plain to music industry watchers that the major recording companies were responding to falling sales in instrumental jazz by winding down their jazz department activity, since they believed that instrumental jazz “did not sell”—or at least sell in the kind of numbers that were attractive to them. “[Jazz is] not an easy listen, so instrumental jazz artists who are creating much of the most imaginative music suffer,” Billboard noted.⁶³ This depressing finding suggested that the very essence of jazz, the instrumental solo, had become less attractive to majority taste.

This might have something to do with the well-documented fall in attention spans, especially among the young. “They are growing up in a world that offers them instant access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge,” says Janna Quitney Anderson, coauthor of a Pew Internet Project study in conjunction with Elon University, published in 2012. “While most of the survey participants see this as mostly positive, some said they are already witnessing deficiencies in young people’s abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply. Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people become shallow consumers of information.”64 Substance was giving way to the demand for short phrases or sentences intended to convey information in highly condensed summary form, or “quick-fix information nuggets.”⁶⁵ Yet even by the mid-1980s, drummer Jack DeJohnette had noticed that audience attention spans were falling, and he fine-tuned his music to take account of this, commenting in 2006: “An audience’s attention wasn’t what it was when Coltrane was playing. By [1984’s Album Album] we were back to shorter cuts—it makes you concentrate, consolidate yourself.”⁶⁶ Back then our attention span was around twelve minutes, according to data published in Assisted Living Today. It has now fallen, the report revealed, to around five seconds.⁶⁷

It is entirely possible that such developments may have translated into the listening habits of younger audiences. For example, many would argue that the popular trend of passively consuming music “on the go”—via iPods or smart phones when walking, jogging, cycling, roller-skating, commuting, shopping, and so forth—is in tune with reduced attention spans where concentration flicks between audio and visual stimuli as the consumer interacts with and negotiates reality. What characterizes listening to music in the twenty-first century is how it has been transformed by both the technological revolution and mass consumerism to the extent that we are living in a world saturated by music—on the Internet, on the radio at home or in the car, on television and in films, in shopping malls, hotel lobbies, in restaurants, in bars, on the telephone while waiting on hold, and so on—but few people actually listen to or engage with music disseminated in this way. It fulfills the function of what Erik Satie called “Furniture Music,” providing an undemanding background ambience, a pleasant and comforting soundtrack to modern life, its ready availability bringing into question the level of attentiveness that young audiences are prepared to commit to a cognitively demanding music like jazz. Indeed, majority taste may now be at odds with music of inherent complexity (of any sort), amid the growing trend of passive music consumption. The combination of technology and mass consumption has created a cultural landscape quite unlike anything in the past, or even the near past, since the immediacy of the Internet has meant that the distinction between everyday experience and cultural experience has collapsed; the Internet is no longer a supplement to cultural activity but a replacement for it. The arts are being made redundant by technological progress and are being replaced by spectacle, celebrity, and consumerism. Indeed, John Storey argues that it is no longer credible to see culture as an ideological representation, since we are witnessing not only the collapse of the distinction between high culture and popular culture but also the collapse of the distinction between culture and economic activity.68

In the 1960s, psychologist Daniel Berlyne, then of the University of Toronto, began to investigate whether aesthetic judgment can be ascribed to measurable features of objects under scrutiny, and in particular their “information content.” Although Berlyne’s experiments were confined to visual perception, he discovered that too little content led to negative judgments and too much content turned people off, with the highest degree of preference being expressed for a moderate degree of complexity. In music, for example, this might correlate with a composition that used a simple melody line of a few notes, whereupon negative judgments may ensue because boredom might be considered a reasonable response to the music; a piece utilizing a high degree of melodic complexity might also induce a negative response in some listeners as the ear “maxes out.”

The significance of Berlyne’s ideas for music were investigated by the American psychologist Paul Vitz in 1966. His work concluded that the “complexity” of a piece of music is partly a subjective quantity that depends on whether we possess a mental system capable of making sense of it. Nevertheless, a bias toward lower complexity levels in music was discovered by Tuomas Eerola and Adrian North in their studies of songs by the Beatles. They examined 182 Beatles songs recorded between 1962 and 1970, assigning each tune a complexity measure that included pitchstep expectations of melodies, tonal hierarchy of notes, rhythmic complexity, and so on, and concluded that the songs became more complex over time. The reaction of the record-buying public over the same period was that the number of weeks a hit single spent in the charts fell as the songs grew more complex—and the same story was repeated with the group’s albums, which also became progressively more complex.⁶⁹ These findings might, on the face of it, serve to confirm what every Beatles fan already knew, but nevertheless they suggest that lessons can be learned by jazz musicians, since a large section of the public might argue that many jazz solos today contain too much information for untrained ears to comprehend, and thus sound less attractive than other genres of music with a moderate degree of complexity. Even to trained ears, virtuosity for its own sake has the effect of diminishing meaning, so that a perfectly reasonable response to a long display of instrumental pyrotechnics might be, “What was that all about? What was the musician trying to say?”

It’s worth remembering in this post-Coltrane era that the most influential saxophonist who preceded him, Charlie Parker, valued brevity. He seldom played more than three or four consecutive choruses of the blues, but he knew what he wanted to say and said it. In an interview on BBC Television in 2011, guitarist Carlos Santana spoke about the importance of making every note count and making a musical statement that reaches out and moves the audience in some way: “When you take a solo,” he said, “you are required to know where you are going, what you are trying to say, and then get the hell out of there and give it to the next guy. So what is required for you to understand is where you go when you take a solo, you are going straight to people’s hearts and what you are trying to say to them—you say you matter, you are significant and you can make a difference in the world. Now that is a solo.”70

The question jazz musicians must surely ask themselves in the new millennium years is how to adapt to the ways in which music is now being consumed among potential audiences, especially in the face of findings by bodies such as the Pew Internet Study Group, which was finding a tendency among young people to display “an expectation of instant gratification [and] a lack of patience,” and an inability to “undertake deep, critical analysis of issues and challenging information.”⁷¹ In the past, jazz musicians proved remarkably flexible in reacting to sociocultural change: for example, when jazz lost its functional role as a dance music, and thus the specific role it played within people’s lives as music for social interaction, the move from dancehall into the nightclub saw the music’s function change to fulfill the expectations of a seated, listening audience. In the late 1960s, jazz musicians adopted the rhythms and tone colors of rock music to enable their music to appear relevant to audience expectations of the time. Now, with profound sociocultural changes flowing from the Internet’s rapidly evolving digital information networks, jazz composers and soloists surely needed to consider whether performance practices that have barely changed in half a century are relevant for today’s audiences.

More than ever there is a need to be sensitive to the changing tastes and aspirations of audiences, who while being open to the challenge of a jazz solo also attend a jazz concert to enjoy themselves. This creates an aesthetic balancing act that many artists fail to negotiate, seemingly unaware that today’s consumer society brings with it the immediacy of wish fulfillment. Audiences are more willing than ever before to migrate to the unprecedented number of alternative musical forms on offer if they are not moved or otherwise engaged by the music at hand. Attention spans are short: we are in an age of TV channel zapping with a vengeance, so soloists need to understand the material they are engaged with and construct their improvisation around the need of the composition rather than launching out on their own personal muses, which may or may not relate to the thematic material at hand and so lose the interest of the audience. One common fault among younger musicians is to undervalue the importance of melody and melodic development; after all, having graduated from music college there is a desire to show the world what they have learned—technical accomplishment—which can result in a degree of complexity in their creations that audiences are unable to relate to. This was a hard but valuable lesson saxophonist Branford Marsalis was confronted with during his early years as a bandleader, after being signed by Columbia Records in the early 1980s:

I had a couple of great learning experiences [as a young musician]. One of the experiences was when we were playing at Royal Festival Hall [in London], and we were opening for Stan Getz. At that time we were playing this burn-out stuff, and I went to Stan before the concert and said to him, “I’m really looking forward to hearing you,” and he said, “Great, because you could learn a few things.” And that pissed me off, so we decided we would play our most complicated music and at the end of the third song as I went to announce something, someone from the audience yells, “I can’t hear a note you guys are playing,” and half the audience applauded. Now the most damning aspect of that was at the time it was clear to me the guy was right, but unfortunately at the time I only knew how to play one way, so all we could deliver to them was more of the same shit that we were doing. And then Stan comes in, he backs away from the mike and they play bossa [novas] all night and the audience loves them. So, it was clear, because Stan walks off the stage and he says to me, “And have we learned something tonight?” And I said, “Yes sir, we have.” And he said, “Good,” and he walked away. So I started playing more ballads, the next gig I started playing more ballads, and I was horrible at it, but I kind of understood that the only way to get better was to keep doing it, so it’s all these little things these older jazz musicians—because I had the privilege of being around them—kind of imported to me either through direct conversation or empirical observation. Some of the younger guys today, they’re here to blast everybody, they’re there to let you know they’re geniuses and that they’re innovative.72

Today, the ability to harness melody and melodic development is in danger of being replaced by mechanical techniques to negotiate harmonic progressions that are becoming ends in themselves: the use of pattern running, or sequencing as it is sometimes known, such as melodic sequencing that preserves the relationship of a group of notes, one to another, through each succeeding chord, or rhythmic sequencing, which is the repetition of a rhythmic figure in which the notes do not necessarily retain the melodic relationship one to another but preserve their rhythmic relationship, that—together with familiar licks learned from recordings or study aids to negotiate common harmonic progressions—have become a familiar feature of contemporary jazz improvisation. It is a trend that concerns virtuoso vibist and jazz educator Gary Burton:

It’s easier to play based on a lot of patterns and things that you have learned and practiced, it’s easier to do that than develop the ability to play really well-developed themes and build thematic solos. If I look at my heroes in jazz, it’s Bill Evans, it’s Miles, it’s Coltrane, it’s Sonny Rollins, these are all players whose solos unfold like a story, and you hang on every word, so to speak, as they work their way through their solo and you feel like you’ve been on a journey with them. The opposite approach to playing is to play patterns, one after another, but they don’t tell a story. They sound correct and they sound impressive, perhaps, but they are familiar phrases that are almost clichés in many cases, familiar jazz phrases, and the soloist sort of strings them together and makes up a solo that way. That’s much less interesting to me and there is a tendency among younger players to settle for that. When I was first playing with Stan Getz, I was standing next to a guy who could tell stories that could bring tears to your eyes, and so I felt challenged to do this also, like, “Yeah, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” So that’s been my goal throughout my playing career, to really learn how to thematically develop a solo and turn it into a storyline and get that continuity. Listening to good examples is part of it; there is also trying to figure out how to get there from where you are to over there. In my teaching I put a lot of emphasis on the mental processes we go through to make it a storyline, why practicing phrases and patterns over and over again works against us instead of helping us, and trying to point people towards the kinds of playing experiences they will benefit from and away from the kind of practices that will steer them in the wrong direction, but I have to honestly say that most teachers of jazz and improvisation probably don’t talk about that sort of thing much because they are not sure of it themselves.73

Mastery of technique tends to be a dominant topic in jazz education, while discussion on the implications of melody, meaning, or emotion within improvisation is too often ignored. In both live performance and on recordings, an increasing use of patterns by young (and not-soyoung) musicians today, together with an emphasis (often peer driven) on executive fluency, has meant that speed of execution has become a thing-in-itself for many musicians, a benchmark applauded by those in the business but often baffling to those outside it, the all-important audience. This tendency toward self-indulgence, whereby soloists expect audiences to meet them on their own terms, simply serves to drive a wedge between potential fans and performers; as saxophonist Branford Marsalis points out, “People are not interested in doing homework to attend a jazz concert.”⁷⁴ The importance of melodic expressivity and melodic development, and rediscovering the soloist’s story-telling privilege, is something saxophonist Joe Lovano emphasizes at his master classes:

A lot of times, up at Berklee [College of Music], at NYU and other faculties, I do a lot of unaccompanied playing in my class and I get a lot of cats to try that, and even though you practice alone I find that most of the young players of whatever instrument have a hard time playing unaccompanied and playing a piece right through by themselves, whatever instrument—a bass player, a trumpet player, a saxophone player—piano players do that all the time, guitar players also. Just play and accompany themselves and just play alone. But a lot of horn players, the single note players, they’re not sure how to do it. “Well man, what do you do when you practice?” A lot of times they’ll be playing patterns or something out of a book or I don’t know what. “Play through a song or play three or four chords from a tune you love to play,” that’s what I tell them. Half the time they stand there and they’re wondering what to do. “Man, play a song you love, what do you love to play?” That question takes a lot because to answer that as a young player you have to dig deep. You have to stop and think about it, “Wow, what do I really love to play? I love to play page 36, exercise 14.” [laughs] You know?⁷⁵

Eschewing the art of melodic construction within a solo and ignoring precedents set by the great masters of lyrical improvisation, such as a Lester Young, a Dexter Gordon, a Stan Getz, a Miles Davis, or a Clark Terry, and favoring instead complexity and pattern running, serves to distance the performer from the audience by not giving audience members something they can relate to. Joe Lovano points out that these great instrumentalists were all masters of melodic expressivity, reaching out to the audience by shaping the contours of a song in their own personal style, an art he believes is slowly being lost in jazz. “Well, do you know why?” he asks.

I think a lot of teachers at some of these universities are cats who have studied music and can play, but they have learned from playing patterns so that’s what they teach. These days there are more and more situations for people like myself to have opportunities to share other approaches, give people confidence to play with interpretation—I mean Dexter Gordon could play the same song twenty times in a row and it’ll be the same song but he would play it with interpretation. Same with Miles Davis. He could play the same song all day, let’s say twenty, thirty times, and every time it will be the same melody, the same chords, but his imagination, his approach is what it’s about. Develop your own approach—and that takes a lot of confidence. There are a lot of cats today who would play that same song and you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it’s the fifth time they played it or the twentieth, they’d play it the same way every time, as far as their rhythm and phrasing and so on.76

Respecting the primacy of melodic expressivity and development within jazz improvisation is a significant step toward conveying meaning that is so essential to communicating with an audience. As psychologist Daniel Berlyne pointed out earlier, too much information turns people off, so rather than seeing a solo as an opportunity to work through all the licks and patterns learned in practice, musicians should see the solo as a challenge to find a voice within the composition that sustains and enhances the emotional climate of the thematic material at hand—a study of Duke Ellington’s soloists at work in his 1940–41 band can be informative in this respect. “It’s the strength of melody that people are really in tune with,” reflects bassist Christian McBride. “I think as you grow as a musician you start to understand this and are more willing to embrace the beauty and the simplicity of melody. I think that probably comes with time, and this is not to say young jazz musicians don’t deal with melody, because some do, but I wish I could find some sort of balance with a lot of younger musicians really trying to seek out melody, or embracing melody, to an extent that people outside of their generation understand what’s happening.”77

Equally, composers need to come up with material that has the potential to move the listener in some way, not simply to regard the composition as a vehicle for collecting royalties or a means of establishing key, tempo, and harmonic structure. As the British pianist Dan Nicholls observes, jazz artists today need to negotiate and consider their relationship between artistic production and audience perception:

It’s very easy to become wrapped up in your own world—especially seeing as such personal and individual music as jazz runs the risk of being very egocentric and inward looking—and to forget that there is an audience who are giving you their time and energy and paying for the experience. Too many jazz concerts feature something that is either totally disconnected from the audience, gratuitously complex and alienating, or presented in an apologetic nature, none of which interests me or the majority of people. Since I started trying to see the music more objectively and listening to the views of less experienced audience members, I began to see it, as well as hear it, differently. I now feel strongly that my music is primarily for the audience and, whilst keeping my artistic integrity and being uncompromising with my material, I hope to be able to communicate my ideas and present my music in a way which invites people in.⁷⁸

Today, the jazz composition has to be something more than “a vehicle for improvisation”; audiences want an experience, to be to made to feel happy, sad, elated, or excited—otherwise what is the point? It is a given today that the contemporary jazz musician must posses a high degree of technical and theoretical skills. So once a musician has acquired the necessary skill and experience to function with a high level of proficiency within the improvising environment, the question then becomes: how do you separate yourself from the countless other young musicians with similar skills and experience, who also function with a high level of proficiency within the improvising environment? Increasingly, many are coming to believe that the answer lies in being able to create an original and effective context within which to frame your improvisational skills. While jazz was once primarily a soloist’s art, it is now context that is increasingly coming to define originality. This dichotomy between the concept of a solo as a thing-in-itself or coming embodied within a broader concept was seen early on during the rise of bebop. In bebop, the “head” served as a springboard for the soloist to take flight, to follow his or her creative muse (guided by the underlying harmonies and rhythm) for as long as he or she liked before the recapitulation of the theme. On the Capitol recordings of Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet, the opposite was true. Each composition was richly orchestrated, and the soloists were charged with integrating their work into the greater whole in a way that related to the overall context of the piece; as a result, their work somehow assumed greater meaning. But the conceptual nature of creating a musical environment such as this demanded rehearsals and arrangements—an investment of time and money that was often not practical in the day-today life of a musician—then as now. Today pick-up bands are ubiquitous, with the Real Book providing a common language and the means by which ad hoc ensembles function; that in turn imposes a kind of uniformity, because there is usually no money for rehearsal time to explore alternative ways of approaching jazz. Thus the domination of the soloist is in part a function of business imperatives, which often have a tendency toward homogeneity. Today it is possible that the similarity in style, concept, and execution of pick-up groups might simply not interest young audiences. The implicit problem here is of creating a music that speaks to itself but fails to engage the broader public: writer Francis Davis has written of the “deadening sameness” of what he was hearing on record and in clubs, pointing out that boredom was a reasonable response to “a lineup of soloists running down the chords to no apparent purpose.”79

This raises the question of the role jazz musicians themselves have played in falling audience numbers. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis is one of many top jazz musicians who believe they have played a role in this: “I definitely think it is mostly the musicians’ fault,” he says. “If you’re playing music and everything is highly intellectualized and cerebral, and remote and distant, you’re basically . . . I don’t know what. You’re basically playing for your colleagues, and for the media that supports it, and when you go to concerts now that’s kinda what you see. Fellas come on stage, they get on the microphone and they whisper into the microphone, ‘thankyouverymuchladiesandgentleman,’ they have this very distant, far-off relationship with the audience, and the audience picks up on that, and the majority of the audience are not interested.”⁸⁰

Marsalis points to other important factors in the presentation of jazz where many young jazz musicians fall short, saying he gradually came to understand that what musicians wear and how they carry themselves on stage play into how the music is perceived and by whom.

When people talk to me about my band they talk to me about how much they enjoy watching us, how much they enjoy watching how much we enjoy playing with each other, they never talk about the music—except when we play a ballad, and then they say this ballad made me cry or this ballad was really moving, or something like that—they talk about the energy and body language on stage, call it charisma if you will. I think the old guys understood that, which is why you see them in those pictures smiling, and wearing suits—even Charlie Parker smiling and wearing a suit in the press photo—and they “got” that you had to give them something to see. There has to be a lifeline.81

It is interesting to note that a survey conducted by Dr. Chia-Jung Tsay of the University College of London’s (UCL) Management, Science and Innovation Department in 2013 discovered that respondents could reliably select the winners of classical music competitions based on silent video recordings of performances alone. The results lend considerable resonance to Marsalis’s observations in that they highlight the uncomfortable finding that we rely more on visual information when judging live music than the sound of the music itself. Visual cues, such as the perception of a performer’s “passion” or “involvement,” were found to be good predictors of winning performances according to the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The results show that even when we want to be objective in evaluating the sound of music, when it comes to live performance, the visual experience can be the most influential aspect,” confirmed Dr. Tsay.⁸²

Equally, it is perfectly possible for a musician to do everything “correctly,” executing everything the right way, playing within the conventions of a certain style in an idiomatically correct manner to a high level of proficiency—and yet the results can appear mechanical or fail to evoke an emotional response from the listener, so boredom becomes a possible response. Another reason might be that a particular style has been so extensively exploited over the years it is almost impossible to come up with a fresh, surprising, original, or even interesting statement within the idiom. For example, listening to the recordings of the great New Orleans jazz masters can be a moving and exhilarating experience, but since 1917 there have been so many recordings and bands playing within the conventions of its style that the idiom exists today more as a historical endeavor. The long road that began near Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall now extends over a century, and at some point along this route proliferation within the art form has inevitably led to its devaluation—as it does in all the arts.

At the height of bebop in the 1940s and 1950s, when improvisers created something exceptional they were imitated by other members of the musical community, and quickly assimilated into the broader syntax of the music. Certain key phrases or licks, exercised within the parameters of the bebop style, had, even by the mid-1950s, become widely disseminated and imitated. Today, like an inverted triangle, hundreds of thousands of students and thousands of teachers study this narrow repository of stylistic inspiration (the pantheon of truly “great” bebop players in all of jazz is probably fewer than fifteen musicians), which has resulted in a similarity of concept and execution among many musicians. Once again, the proliferation of a style or genre has led to its devaluation, and boredom becomes a possible response. “How can you play music from the 1950s like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers when you live in New Jersey, your bass player lives in West Chester, and you have to fly in your drummer—he’s teaching in Michigan?” asks composer, saxophonist, and Grammy winner Bob Belden. “They rehearse, they have music stands up there, they’re playing something that’s been recorded, so you have a reference point, and yet none of the guys have played gigs from hell, had any poverty, and nobody has said to them, ‘You can’t eat in here,’ so it’s just an intellectual exercise. Okay, some people, some critics, might say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ But stamp collecting is interesting, butterfly collecting is interesting, is that all it is, interesting? Shouldn’t it be mind blowing or devastating or life changing?”83

A similar question might be asked of tribute bands that are regularly hired by clubs and festivals. While they may be “interesting” to behold, they are seldom able to offer the sound of surprise. These ensembles, where musician X plays the music of Ray Charles, musician Y plays the music of Jaco Pastorius or some other deceased great, or, more commonly, musician A and musician B play the music of Miles Davis, mark the point where history becomes nostalgia before it becomes myth. Often seen as crowd-pullers by concert and festival producers, tribute bands often fail to live up to expectation and appear to reinforce the impression that jazz is now more about the past than the present. “Beware of those blasts from the past,” headlined the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which went on to comment: “It is a little frightening when jazz fans pay so much attention to the past rather than being more concerned with what is down the road.”84 It was a point underlined by the Kansas City Star, with a feature headlined “Too Many Jazz Tribute Shows Leave Little Room for Innovation.” In a hard-hitting but fair appraisal, it noted:

Concert and club presenters sometimes fret that jazz doesn’t bring in the crowds like it used to. But is booking tribute shows the way to bring the crowds back or build a new audience for the future? Some tribute shows make a populist appeal . . . but chances of a tribute show improving on the originals aren’t good. Often it’s a pale imitation of the original or a half-hearted reinterpretation.

The tribute show pretty much guarantees that we don’t get the best performers have to give, because performers are doing someone else’s thing instead of their own. In fact, these shows might have the opposite effect of what presenters want: they might be driving people away by sending the wrong message . . . that the innovations have all been made, the greatest performances already played. That jazz is over.⁸⁵

Certainly, undertakings such as the tribute band serve to highlight the fact that audiences exist for jazz as a nostalgic endeavor, a curious paradox whereby they feel nostalgic for an art form that is still largely of the present. How, then, can you feel regret for something that has passed when it is still present? The answer is, of course, that it is possible to experience nostalgia for the past if it speaks to you more loudly than the present. Today, with over one hundred years of recorded jazz history, consumers are faced with the paradox of plenty. Instead of exploring the wealth of information available to us via information technology, we systematically opt for that which agrees with our own ideological disposition, or so social scientific research has revealed. We are not the free radicals we like to think we are, becoming ever more selective in choosing what to consume. Writing of feeling like H. G. Wells’s time traveler, the critic Gary Giddins once wrote: “Wells’s hero chased the future; I prefer the past. In the future you may encounter a Parker or Monk or just a bunch of Molochs. With the past you’ve got the sure thing.”⁸⁶

This is perhaps an understandable response to the diversity of today’s jazz scene, where some either choose to give up, or are unable to keep abreast of, current events,⁸⁷ so that, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “the known knowns” become more attractive when exercising consumer choice than the “known unknowns,” the things we know we don’t know—music that extends beyond that with which we are familiar.

In many ways it might be argued that falling audience numbers in jazz have been a result of a perfect storm, whereby a chain of seemingly unrelated circumstances combine to create an exceptional event. What seems clear is that more than ever jazz needs to create its own space in a hostile media landscape. It’s not impossible. The fact that Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue has continued to accumulate four-figure sales each month well into the new millennium suggests that instrumental jazz can sell—and be relevant to twenty-first-century consumer expectations. If we look a little closer at Kind of Blue from a consumer perspective, we see that it is an album that fulfills the function of both passive and active listening. The passive listener might regard it as sophisticated background music that cleverly sustains an intimate mood through the choice of slow-medium tempos, so providing an ambiance that may be appropriate for a dinner party or as an accompaniment to making love. But it is also an album that encourages active listening, where it functions as emotionally and intellectually stimulating foreground music. It is music that is challenging but does not exclude the nonspecialist listener who feels free to engage with the music on his or her own terms. Even though it was recorded in 1959, it still remains relevant to today’s culture, illustrated by a scene in the motion picture Runaway Bride, where the character played by actress Julia Roberts gives Richard Gere’s character an original vinyl copy of the album as a token of her undying love.

Today, when people leave their homes for an evening’s entertainment, they want to be certain they are going to enjoy themselves more than they do when they leave for their workplace. They are prepared to accept an element of challenge, but challenge in the context of relaxation. The cachet jazz has acquired in the current populist climate implies the challenge but not the relaxation, so this might suggest that jazz musicians have some soul searching to do. The time seems right for the music to respond to the social and cultural changes that are occurring in society around them by shaping their music in a way that finds a function in people’s lives that is in tune with twenty-first-century consumerist lifestyles and metropolitan attitudes. “There’s an important function that jazz musicians have which is to reconcile their vision of music with the current state of the universe,” says guitarist Pat Metheny. “That responsibility is neglected sometimes, in the face of just the grammar. And the thing is the study of the grammar is so fun and so fascinating it’s really easy for me to see how young guys can just immerse themselves in that.”88

While jazz is never going to be popular, it does need to appear relevant to the lives and expectations of those who seek a route toward it. Jazz needs to provide bridges over the yawning chasm between itself and popular culture to let people in, just as “My Favourite Things,” “Take Five,” “Poinciana,” and yes, even “Hello Dolly” did in the past. The importance of pieces like these was that they communicated jazz’s essential core values in accessible form. You only have to look at the huge success of Kind of Blue to realize that great jazz need not be defined in terms of complex, tormented brain puzzles that are beyond the ken of everyone except a specialist audience. Yet this is where the popular perception of jazz has ended up, with the nation’s cultural gatekeepers believing the music to be too complex to be popular and so remote from popular taste as to be elitist. The domination of our cultural spaces by popular music is increasingly banishing any interest in, or perceived need for, any other kind of music. This is the challenge jazz musicians have to confront: to accept that they have a very real role in addressing the problem of falling audience numbers. The path ahead for jazz may be complex and full of potential pitfalls, but it is a path that has to be followed, since jazz must find a way to continue to speak to the society that spawned it. If it fails do that, or when society does not want to hear what it is saying, the future for the music becomes bleak.