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Why Don't People Like Jazz? A Public Forum |
Why do you think jazz, real jazz, isn't that well-liked? I know it's not that popular, I recently heard that only about 3% of all albums sold each year are jazz - not exactly America's sweetheart... But why? Here're some possibilities: 1) I don't understand how it works, so I can't find a foothold to begin to appreciate it, 2) I don't like music without lyrics, 3) It just sounds like a bunch of disorganized honking, 4) no banjos or steel guitars, 5) I like football, so what can ya do? Seriously, let's talk about this.
I think the reasons you state are interesting, but not on the mark. It's simple. Jazz requires participation. Jazz requires concentration. You have to LISTEN to it. Who wants to do that? It's too much like work! (Thanks for a great site.)
Jazz is indescribable. It's one of those things you either get or don't get. It either moves you or it doesn't. You don't have any control over that. As a teenager, when all of my contemporaries were listening to the Beatles, I was out searching for the new Miles LP.
How could I define why people don't like jazz when I really don't know why I love it so much myself? Each time I ask myself that question, an embarrassing elitist answer comes to mind. It's too complicated for the masses. What else could it be?
I hate the sanctimonious analytical approach to defining jazz too. Who the hell cares or needs to know but those who don't understand it or feel it in their souls? I don't know what jazz is either. I just KNOW it when I hear it. So does everyone else who loves it.
First, I blame the dearth of popularity of jazz and classical music on the wretched state of music education and support for the arts in the United States. We have moved beyond civic stinginess to a kind of national belligerence: "Damn right, we're stupid, and proud of it!" This extends to other areas too: science, history, world affairs.
Second, when some people have difficulty locating the melody in a piece of music their interest wanes. Witness the success of "smooth jazz" and new age music, which have strong melodies, simple structures and rhythms (and usually stick to major chords).
Third, there are those people who need lyrics to feel comfortable with music. (Who knows, maybe they feel the need to move their lips when they read too.)
Fourth, to appeal to younger people music needs to be stimulating. If your thinking is still affected by the hormones racing through your body, you are not as inclined to sit quietly and contemplate the qualities that make a piece of music good. You want to feel it instinctively and viscerally. Music or musicians that displays a sense of humor are appealing too. Kids probably associate seriousness with authority figures like their teachers and parents.
The most important thing I learned growing up (from Frank Zappa, especially) was that all kinds of music could be exciting and vital, not just rock-and-roll.
I mentioned your question, re: the popularity of jazz, to a friend this evening and he said - "Just tell them to go to Korea". That should be a good quote for the website. Why is jazz more popular in Japan and Korea than in the place of its birth? The popular music of the 1890s through the 1940s was more involved and interesting than what we have now. I sometimes think in terms of high church music, or court music, and common music. For about 50 years popular music required classical skills to create and perform. But in the 1950s the schism again intensified - jazz is high secular church music - performed for urban court ceremonies - requiring formal listening, formal commentary (Ken Burns), and an elite patronage (e.g. public radio and college radio stations). It's not bad for there to be such a distinction (unless you want fame and money of course). I remember in high school hearing the later John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and thinking - I don't get this but it is worth knowing, so I went to sleep with the radio on a college station that played jazz all night - and pretty soon I was hearing the birds sing and urban synchronicity - still do hear that. It is a little disconcerting to live in a culture where one must be a radical to develop a refined sensitivity - generally refinement is a hallmark of being vested in the best values of the culture - inherently conservative. Oh well - maybe it is more fun to live with this tension.
What is your definition of real jazz? Of all the music genres, I think jazz is the most difficult to classify. I think a lot of people listen to and like jazz but don't know it's jazz. If you are talking about traditional jazz (which I define as Dave Brubeck Quartet "Take 5"), I think people just don't want to spend time actually listening to music anymore. People are moving too fast and don't have time to relax and listen and let the music move them. Music is not art anymore, it is business. Musicians playing popular music seem to be more concerned with the profits of the tour and the marketing than the music. Unfortunately, this concern has also gripped the listeners. Hence they listen to the CD with the coolest cover and the best commercial with the guy with the coolest pants down around his ass. Jazz is for the rest of people who still like music for the sake of music... not for profits and concerts and t-shirts and marketing contracts. If you like music, you like jazz.
I pick answer # 3): It just sounds like a bunch of disorganized honking. I'm listening as we speak to an album by Jeff "Tain" Watts, and it strikes *me* as a bunch of disorganized honking -- as does a lot of stuff that Branford Marsalis plays on. Seriously, I think all your answers are correct, and am a bit surprised (shocked?) you'd even pose the question. People start out life hearing "Rock a Bye Baby," "Twinkle Twinkle" and "This Old Man"; it's a fuck of a long way to Dave Brubeck -- to say nothing of John Coltrane's "Ascension" -- and not a lot of people invest the time, or much care, to make the journey.
I think you're right on the money when you come up with reasons why jazz is not as popular as other forms -- people have trouble relating when the meter/beat/harmony shifts unpredictably. I also think you're right that people need lyrics to hook them into it. I still love it, and I know lots of people that do as well, although most are on the other side of 40. I do know some young folks into it, but they are the rarity. Part of it is that they see jazz as music from older folks and fuddy-duddys.
Why jazz isn't popular in America? It's the only truly created, originated, made in the USA musical form (unless you consider Native American music). I think, quite simply, (and maybe I shall over-simplify) that it just doesn't get all that much air time on the radio. Let's face it: most sets are longer than 3 minutes, don't have any grunting (rap), no shrieking (grunge), no "catchy beat you can dance to...I'll rate it an 85" (hip-hop), no T & A (that whole set of post-pubescents who call themselves rock stars). Jazz is raw...it doesn't lend itself to selling clearasil and skooters & playstations or any of the other stuff that is peddled on the air. Stations play what pays the bills, not what most of us want to hear. But, the bottom line is, what isn't heard doesn't sell, no matter how fabulous it is. Jazz is art; the aforementioned just sells products.
Holy smoke... A big, big subject... I guess I would point out that in its earliest days, jazz was good-time music for dances, parties, picnics etc... It didn't acquire a "listening" pedigree until considerably later, perhaps during the swing era. And then, there was a schizoid dichotomy between music for partying and quasi-serious music for listening. At the same time, the big-corporate-media-machine forces fads and fashions to come and go, and pop music for dancing or whatever is a very fashion-oriented business, so people stopped dancing to swing bands... And then there was the bebop development, to which no one could do anything but the St. Vitus dance anyway, so jazz became a "listening" music, and there aren't that many people who actually *listen*, as we all know. Especially when full enjoyment really depends on knowing a little bit about the music, keeping track of the melodies and improvisations, etc. Also, as you point out, average people like to hear singers sing lyrics, and "jazz singers" are in a terrible pickle regarding material... Endless retreads of Thirties and Forties standards become dull (and who could ever improve on the classic performances of the great original artists of that time?) and new songs in that genre are not written, and somehow I think *can't* be written, though it's hard to say why... And "jazz" interpretations of "rock" songs tend to be monstrosities that should be strangled at birth...
Rob Mounsey also forwarded the following:
Long ago, before there was Napster or Ken Burns's "Jazz," at a time when many of the greatest jazz recordings were still out of print, even before there were CD's, New York had a pretty good commercial jazz radio station, WRVR. When I came to live here in 1971, I thought it was everything a great jazz station should be. But in the next few years the programming was slowly watered down. The playlist came to be dominated by commercial jazz recordings, which were known in those days as "fusion" and today might be called crossover jazz.
Around the time of the station's demise in 1980, a prominent New York concert promoter asked me to join a campaign to save it. The jazz community, he told me, was losing an important resource. Mentioning two of the dominant artists on WRVR in its last days, he argued to me: "If a kid hears a John Klemmer or Chuck Mangione record, he might one day get into jazz." That was the standard view of the day: You build an audience through crossover. You start with the easy stuff, and then suddenly one day, like magic, they are going to go for the really great music. And it got me to thinking: What does it take to get an individual interested in jazz?
"Art isn't easy," the lead character sings in Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George," and although this is not to say that jazz is hard, developing an interest in jazz is not a passive or superficial activity.
In most of our lives there are moments when we hear something perhaps played by a parent, friend or teacher; on television, on radio, in a record store, in a movie, in the back of a taxicab, through a Web site that exposes us to jazz music at a very high level. Such an experience often fleeting or unexpected can trigger a deep reaction that sets us into a lifetime of love and passion for this music. The same can be said, of course, for classical music, the shows of Stephen Sondheim or, for that matter, the paintings of Georges Seurat.
Will Ken Burns's "Jazz" be one of those forces of change? In it, many jazz musicians and authors speak with authority, passion, intelligence and great persuasion. But the one thing we can be certain of is that there will be thousands of people sitting in their living rooms who will hear in this documentary, for the first time, a great performance of Louis Armstrong, or Miles Davis, or Duke Ellington. Some may develop a lifelong interest in the many styles of jazz.
Those of us in the record business who are not involved with mainstream pop music have always been faced with the challenge of expanding the audience for the less commercially oriented forms, like jazz or classical or contemporary music. People in the classical business may see a new Brahms Symphony No. 2 come out and be discouraged by sales of only 5,000 in the first year, but with about 200 recordings of that piece available, hundreds of thousands are sold each year. While aspects of the business may be a failure, Brahms's art certainly is not.
In a similar way, the jazz business reaches its audience in a slow but cumulative way. Perhaps my colleagues who express frustration over the sales of contemporary jazz artists have been living too close to the pop world, where things need to happen immediately. It may take a jazz artist 20 or 30 years to become fixed in the public's mind. The fact is that Ellington, Armstrong, Coltrane andDavis, like Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Stravinsky have all individually sold millions of records, but the sales did not happen in six months.
The one thing we can be sure of about jazz is that what ultimately reaches the most people and has the greatest impact is often the greatest music. The battle between art and commerce has been part of the record business since it began. Some see the solution as "marketing," trying to predict the public taste, trying to ease the audience into music. But in forms of music that are not dependent on widespread and instant public acceptance, there needs to be more trust that there is a public that has historically shown that it will find its way.
As I think Wynton and company are a big, big part of the problem, I thought I'd share these two pieces - one very funny, the second well-argued - which were forwarded to me by John Brower:
Written by John Grabowski and posted to rec.music.bluenote on January 25:
Presenting Ken Burns' 144-hour Extremely Important documentary, "Jazz."
Fade up on a grainy old photograph of a man in a three-piece suit, holding a cornet. Or a bicycle horn, it's hard to tell.
Narrator: Skunkbucket LeFunke was born in 1876 and died in 1901. No one who heard him is alive today. The grandchildren of the people who heard him are not alive today. The great-grandchildren of the people who heard him are not alive today. He was never recorded.
Wynton Marsalis: I'll tell you what Skunkbucket LeFunke sounded like. He had this big rippling sound, and he always phrased off the beat, and he slurred his notes. And when the Creole bands were still playing De-bah-de-bah-ta-da-tah, he was already playing Bo-dap-da-lete-do-do-do-bah! He was just like gumbo, ahead of his time.
Narrator: LeFunke was a cornet player, gambler, card shark, pool hustler, pimp, male prostitute, Kelly Girl, computer programmer, brain surgeon and he invented the internet.
Stanley Crouch: When people listened to Skunkbucket LeFunke, they heard Do-do-dee-bwap-da-dee-dee-de-da-da-doop-doop-dap. And they knew even then how deeply profound that was.
Narrator: It didn't take LeFunke long to advance the art of jazz past its humble beginnings in New Orleans whoredom with the addition of a bold and sassy beat.
Wynton: Let me tell you about the Big Four. Before the Big Four, jazz drumming sounded like BOOM-chick-BOOM-chick-BOOM-chick. But now they had the Big Four, which was so powerful some said it felt like a Six. A few visiting musicians even swore they were in an Eight.
Stanley: It was smooth and responsive, and there was no knocking and pinging, even on 87 octane.
Wynton: Even on gumbo.
Narrator: When any musician in the world heard Louis Armstrong for the first time, they gnawed their arm off with envy, then said the angels probably wanted to sound like Louis. When you consider a bunch of angels talking in gruff voices and singing "Hello Dolly," you realize what a stupid aspiration that is.
Gary Giddens: Louis changed jazz because he was the only cat going Do-da-dep-do-wah-be-be, while everyone else was doing Do-de-dap-dit-dit-dee.
Stanley: And that was very profound.
Marsalis: Like gumbo.
Stanley: Uh-huh.
Matt Glaser: I always have this fantasy that when Louis performed in Belgium, Heisenberg was in the audience and he was blown away and that's where he got the idea for his Uncertainty Principle.
Wynton: Because the Uncertainty Principle, applied to jazz, means you never know if a cat is going to go Dap-da-de-do-ba-ta-bah or Dap-da-de-do-bip-de-beep.
Glaser: Louis was the first one to realize that.
Stanley: And that can be very profound.
Wynton: I thought it was a box of chocolates...
Narrator: The Savoy Ballroom brought people of all races colors and political persuasions together to get sweaty as Europe moved closer and closer to the brink of World War II.
Savoy Dancer: We didn't care what color you were at the Savoy. We only cared if you were wearing deodorant.
Stanley: Wynton always wears deodorant.
Glaser: I'll bet Arthur Murray was on the dance floor and he was thinking about Louis and that's where he got the idea to open a bunch of dance schools.
Stanley: And that was very profound.
Giddens: Let's talk about Louis some more. We've wasted three minutes of this 57-part documentary not talking about Louis.
Wynton: He was an angel, a genius, much better than Cats.
Stanley: He invented the word "Cats."
Wynton: He invented swing, he invented jazz, he invented the telephone, the automobile and the polio vaccine.
Stanley: And the internet.
Wynton: Very profound.
Narrator: Louis Armstrong turned commercial in the 1930s and didn't make any more breakthrough contributions to jazz. But it's not PC to point that out, so we'll be showing him in every segment of this series to come, even if he's just doing the same things as the last time you saw him.
Glaser: I'll bet Chuck Yeager was in the audience when Louis was hitting those high Cs at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, and that's what made him decide to break the sound barrier.
Stanley: And from there go to Pluto.
Wynton: I'm going to make some gumbo.
Stanley: BOOM-chick-BOOM-chick-BOOM-chick
Giddens: Do-yap-do-wee-bah-scoot-scoot-dap-dap...That's what all the cats were saying back then.
Narrator: In 1964, John Coltrane was at his peak, Eric Dolphy was in Europe, where he would eventually die, the Modern Jazz Quartet was making breakthrough recordings in the field of Third Stream Music, Miles Davis was breaking new barriers with his second great quintet, and Charlie Mingus was extending jazz composition to new levels of complexity. But we're going to talk about Louis singing "Hello Dolly" instead.
Stanley: Louis went, Ba-ba-yaba-do-do-dee-da-bebin-doo-wap-deet-deet-do-da-da.
Wynton: Sweets went, Scoop-doop-shalaba-yaba-mokey-hokey-bwap-bwap-tee-tee-dee.
Giddens: I go, Da-da-shoobie-doobie-det-det-det-bap-bap-baaaaa...
Narrator: The rest of the history of jazz will be shown in fast forward and will occupy exactly seven seconds. There, that was it. Now here are some scenes from Ken Burns' next documentary, a 97-part epic about the Empire State Building, titled "The Empire State Building."
"It is tall and majestic. It is America's building. It is the Empire State Building. Dozens of workers gave their lives in the construction of this building."
Matt Glaser: I'll bet that they were thinking of Louis as they were falling to their deaths. I have this fantasy that his high notes inspired the immenseness of the Empire State Building.
Wynton Marsalis: I'll bet most people who'd fall off the Empire State Building would go "Aaaaaahhhh!" But these cats went "Dee-dee-daba-da-da-bop-bop-de-dop-shewap-splat!"
"That's next time on PBS."
AND...
This was posted on rec.music.bluenote by Steve Bayer:
While Ken Burns has been roundly criticized for the scant attention "Jazz" paid to the music since 1970, after seeing episode 10 I only wish he had said nothing whatsoever. What a sour note to end on! My 14-year old son, who had watched the entire series, asked, in confusion, why the last episode was suddenly nothing but people putting down other people's music.
It would have made a far happier ending for everyone, the devoted fan and the newly initiated, to have portrayed the 70's for what they really were: the triumph of jazz, a triumph both commercial and artistic, and, indeed, a triumph inseparable from the success of the civil rights movement.
Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward judged jazz in the 70's to be in a state of collapse and despair, but this is clearly the judgement of people who were not there or, at least, certainly not paying attention.
Here's what the record really shows...
Commercial success:
Jazz consistently charted throughout the decade, from the ridiculous (Deodato's catchy sendup of Richard Strauss) to the sublime (Roberta Flack's spellbinding "First time ever I saw your face", which, Billboard magazine noted, enjoyed the longest stay at No. 1 on the pop charts any female vocalist had achieved since 1956).
Other artists who achieved hit singles on the pop charts: George Benson, Joni Mitchell (with an old Lambert Hendricks and Ross song!), Chuck Mangione (a reminder that Mangione still is the best selling trumpeter of all former Blakey sidemen), Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Carlos Ward (The B.T. Express), Manhattan Transfer (with the Joe Zawinul-Jon Hendricks "Birdland"), Roy Ayers, The Crusaders (with the sensational Randy Crawford). Add the soul charts and the list grows rapidly longer: Donald Byrd, Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington, Jr., David Newman, Webster Lewis, Lonnie Liston Smith, Cedar Walton. Even Milt Jackson hit the soul charts with Cedar's "I'm Not So Sure".
If all this is too "Pop" for you, consider other artists who had major label contracts in the 1970's:
Miles, of course (CBS, Warner Bros.) and of his great quintet, Hancock (Warners, CBS), Shorter (CBS), and Williams (Polydor, CBS), but also Cedar Walton (RCA, then CBS), McCoy Tyner (CBS), Bobby Hutcherson (CBS), Phil Woods (RCA), the Heath Brothers (CBS), Gil Evans (Atlantic, then RCA), Arthur Blythe (CBS), and the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Atlantic).
Aside from the majors, a plethora of independent jazz labels sprang up. Among those those with durable commercial success, Pablo, CTI, Concord, and from Germany, ECM.
In the 1970's, record companies discovered that their back catalog of jazz was nothing less than a cash cow, and the modern-day reissue was born. (It is hard today to realize just how scant was the availability of older music prior to 1970.) But throughout the decade the musical world recognized that the great accomplishments of the 30's, 40's and 50's were "classics", durable works of art that audiences were still eager to hear.
Recognition and Honor:
Jazz did indeed become "classical" in the 70's. Universities recruited jazz musicians for their faculties, with sometimes fierce competition for the top talent. (Jackie McLean could well have told that story!) By the end of the decade, even the staid conservatories were following suit. Governmental arts fund poured in first from the New York State Council on the Arts, then from the National Endowment and the Smithsonian. In 1973 was born the first of the Jazz Repertory orchestras, Chuck Israels' National Jazz Ensemble.
Big bands were touring again. Basie's of course, selling out houses wherever he went, but also Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman (with some superb young musicians and with Wayne Shorter compositions added to his book. There high-profile tours by the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and the Carla Bley Band.
A generation of musicians who had spent much of the sixties in exile, in limbo, or in prison, reappeared to significant acclaim. Burns mentions Dexter Gordon, but could just as well have added Slide Hampton, Betty Carter, Hampton Hawes, Sonny Criss, Johnny Griffin, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Milt Jackson, Phil Woods, Hank Jones, Chet Baker, Ernestine Anderson, and even Dave Brubeck, whose "Two Generations" album was his most successful since "Time Out".
By the 1970's, jazz had virtually taken over incidental music for movies and television. It was virtually impossible to get a job in the studios if you had no jazz experience.
Jazz in the 1970's became not just America's music, but the World's music. Europe and Japan were as much a part of the itinerary as the U.S. And U.S. record and ticket sales were now only one part of the totals revenue. By the late 70's, Cedar Walton could downplay the importance of New York, saying "New York is where my office is." Conversely, artists from all over the world were making a big impact in the U.S.: Airto Moreira & Flora Purim, Dollar Brand, Teramasa Hino, Jean Luc-Ponty, Jan Garbarek, Toshiko Akiyoshi, etc., etc.
It is important to recognize what all this meant for musicians. Mary Lou Williams, like quite a few others of her generation, who had lived from hand to mouth for some 40 years, lived the last years of her life with undreamed-of financial security, recognition, and respect. Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown could not have imagined either the recognition or the remuneration bestowed on Ornette Coleman or Joe Henderson.
Masterpieces:
Finally, there was great music. The recorded legacy should speak for itself. Don Cherry's "Relativity Suite" and Clifford Jordan's "Glass Bead Games". The work of Arthur Blythe, of Carla Bley, of the Randy Weston-Melba Liston Orchestra, of Roland Hanna & Mickey Tucker's New Heritage Keyboard Quartet and Max Roach's MBoom re:Percussion, of Eastern Rebellion, Howard Johnson's Gravity, and Warren Smith's Composers' Workshop Ensemble, of the Tony Williams Lifetime and the Great Jazz Trio. Jump in now to add your favorites, folks, and we'll have, in no time at all, a long thread describing some of the century's finest music.
It is certainly true that Jazz, propelled by the explosive innovations (and ambitions) of the 1960's, moved in the 70's in a thousand different directions, but it has always been the nature of Jazz to assimilate and reshape every conceivable kind of music, and to draw from the entire musical world for its basic working materials. In the 1970's the world was simply shown the true richness of that nature.
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