Is Jazz Dead?

Community

Jazz & More

Author: lucyinthesky

Is jazz dead?

Is jazz a dying art form? Although there is no doubt that jazz has had significant impact on history and culture, it's pretty obvious that not too many people these days listen and buy jazz music. Can jazz survive as a living medium or do we have to look backwards to appreciate it?

Let's take a look some views about jazz and how it can be revived - or whether it even should be.

Weather Bird - Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century, By Gary Giddins
David Rubien of the San Franciso Chronicle reviewed this book by famous jazz critic Gary Giddins, who wrote a jazz column called "The Weather Bird" in the New York publication The Village Voice. Here are some excerpts from his musings on the book's examination of jazz and its inquiry into whether or not it is a dying art form.

'Jazz has become a music of the past, and as opposed to fighting that trend, as he bravely attempted to do for 20 years or so, Giddins is now joining it. Only he's doing it his way, which is to write about history. With no gods looming to take jazz into the future, what else is there for a writer of Giddins' insight and ambition to do?

"Through most of jazz history," Giddins writes in a chapter on Sonny Rollins from "Weather Bird," "elder statesmen were valued for continuing to play well, while the main focus was on younger players whose energy opened new channels. But who today plays with more energy, originality, and purpose than Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, John Lewis, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Sam Rivers, and Sonny Rollins?"

"Originality is nice to find but is no longer the grail," Giddins writes. "Interpretation has trumped it. 'Can you play?' has supplanted 'Can you play something I've not heard before?' - something that comes only from you, and not from your favorite records." This is life in what Giddins calls the "post- historical era," when "new guidelines for listening and evaluating" are called for.

"Jazz as a business is in deep trouble, despite steady sales of archival classics and various commercial uses of those same beloved records, often rendered anonymous in TV ads. How could it be otherwise? Jazz musicians have virtually no access to the machinery of capitalism and multinationals have no patience with leisure pursuits that supply insignificant profits."'

Soul on Ice, By David Yaffe
This article was published in The Nation. Here are some excerpts:

"Norah Jones with her mix of country mannerisms and pop accessibility-keeps Blue Note afloat while lauded musicians cling to their contracts for dear life. "Neoconservatives" run Jazz at Lincoln Center while the avant-garde languishes. Legends are dying while young lions fail to live up to early promise. Conservatories - a booming, multimillion-dollar educational industry, Nicholson laments - are stultifying the young and suppressing innovation. And even though that Ken Burns PBS documentary aired nearly five years ago and tried to spread the word, it too is somehow to blame for jazz's misfortunes. Armstrong, Ellington and Basie managed to thrive during the Depression and segregation, but label conglomerates, MTV, file-sharing and institutional repertory have been hazardous to the music's health on its native grounds. Nicholson, an English jazz critic for the UK magazine Jazzwise, paints a grim picture indeed, but he has a solution: relocate to Europe. The Europeans support the arts, he tells us, are hip to the latest experimental styles and even have Norwegians who play better Ellington revivals than anyone in the dreary United States."

"For the jazz musicians and jazz journalists struggling for mainstream attention, the sky could appear to be falling, but judging from the deluge of recent books, the music's shelf life is just beginning. Jazz, more than any other musical genre, currently dominates academic presses; compared with pondering the use of the grace note in Haydn, chasing the path of Django Reinhardt or a riverboat band might even seem sexy. Hip-hop is so recent, rock and roll so flaky and ubiquitous. Scholarly presses are more willing to admit jazz's importance today than they were when the music was at its most vital stages of development.

For years Oxford's Sheldon Meyer was the only university press editor willing to risk a jazz book, and even then most of the ones he edited were collections of newspaper and magazine columns by journalists with no academic credentials; now, even as these presses are tightening their belts and streamlining their lists, they are devoting more pages to the music than ever. "There are days when I think we are in the Golden Age of my obsessions," wrote John Szwed in Crossovers, one of the many recent university press books on jazz. "The scholarship and popular writing on the contribution of African Americans is now so extensive that you could spend a lifetime reading, looking, and listening, and still never catch up."

It would take a while to catch up on jazz books published in the past year alone. In addition to collections of previously published writings by Szwed, Gary Giddins and Dan Morgenstern, more specialized studies abound: biographies and cultural histories, investigations global and local, musicological and historical, journalistic and scholarly. Is jazz dead? As Louis Armstrong is said to have replied when asked to define jazz, "If you have to ask, you'll never know."'

Views
The two articles above are quite interesting. They note that the record label companies no longer place importance on signing jazz artists. There is also an interesting contradiction in the popularity of jazz music: listeners and buyers of jazz music have gone down, yet the amount of literature being published on jazz and jazz history becomes increasingly extensive (both in academic journals and in popular writing).

Perhaps one way to look at the form of jazz is that it has become almost a paradox - the whole point of jazz was to push boundaries of creativity and do what had not been done before. Yet how are jazz musicians supposed to create something entirely new if so much influence is on what has already been done? It is hard to look both forwards and backwards. Is it perhaps everything that could be done has already been done, and that there is no longer anything to create in an original manner?

The "point" of jazz had, for a long time, seemed to be about pushing limits and playing with concepts of musicality. Today, jazz can seems mostly cliched and concerned mainly with tradition and genres. Other musical artists who don't necessarily fit the jazz stereotype (such as Norah Jones) are considered too "accessible" or "not experimentative enough". But does experimenting necessarily make music better? Where does the point of music go if first and foremost you cannot enjoy it?

I leave you now with an extremely thought-provoking clip from a film called Cry of Jazz, a short documentary made in 1959 discussing jazz and the role of African-Americans in the United States. In this clip, a black man describes why JAZZ IS DEAD. I think this clip best sums up why jazz may be dead.

"Jazz is dead because the negro needs more room to tell his story…the jazz body is dead but the spirit of jazz is alive…the body is dead because inherently the material of jazz does not allow for further growth…Since the jazz body cannot grow, it can only repeat itself. In so doing, it is stagnant. in so doing, it is dead."