BillF

René, you're being ripped off!

M G Hyland Shere Hite Mervyn Peake

See the link in the first post of this thread.

Linda Chalker Cray Onslow Penn Sillers

Ruby My Deer Moose the Mooche Minnie the Moocher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mq4UT4VnbE&feature=kp

Russell Procope Wendy Cope Coop

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/13/us-jazz-singer-jimmy-scott-dies-aged-88

You're definitely wrong there, Guy. Lots of jazz albums got onto the Billboard pop or R&B charts in the eighties. I've got a list of 388 by 131 artists... MG Interesting list, which suggests my claim was somewhat hyperbolic. But if you were to construct similar lists for other decades, my suspicion is there has been a decrease post-1980 (and I would guess the 1990s and 2000s totals are even lower than the 1980s you compiled. Jazz these days is much less relevant to popular culture than it was 50 years ago. Fifty years takes us back to Love Supreme (and the Beatles). I think you need to go further back than that to find significant relevance of jazz to popular culture.

In the same way that some people might regard moving from reading Steinbeck to reading Shakespeare as progress. Back to that over-reverence for established canons. ***************************** We often talk about jazz as if it's a monolith, yet there are so many different musics working under that umbrella. I've experienced Bill's original situation of the jazz club/concert hall with a handful of older listeners. But thinking about it, when I used to go to Cheltenham there was much more of a mix. But I suspect that had a lot to do with the enormous breadth of the bill, deliberately trying to attract a younger audience who might not be hung up on the history like we tend to be (most of whom are probably looking for a one night stand rather than a lifetime's engagement with jazz). Yet within that festival I could go to gigs where the age range was much more slanted on the elderly side. There's a relatively new festival in the UK that seems to be succeeding that very much aims that way. This was last year's bill: And here's a picture - not sure from what year: Don't see anyone there with a notepad checking matrix numbers. So maybe the jazz audience is more varied, age-wise, than we fear. It just depends where you look. Where I suspect it is far more homogeneous is in terms of class. (Here is this year; imagine there's some serious market research behind this: ] I wish 'em well, tho' there would seem to be little there for the aficionado who relishes a finely turned Lester Young solo, say.

Fascinating account of the effect on the music of social, economic, technological, etc factors in the period 1942-72.

I'll put in a word for Terry Shannon, who was a leading British jazz pianist until his disappearance from the music at the end of the sixties. Here he is with Wilton "Bogey" Gaynair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYKpWwCrSJs And here's Simon Spillett's assessment of him (scroll down): http://www.jazzscript.co.uk/extra/brit.piano.htm

Rob Da Bank Bonnie and Clyde Eric Forth

Have added it to my reading list.

It's easy to forget that the decline in jazz audience numbers and some of the possible reasons aired here have been around for fifty years. Marc Myers has this to say in his book Why Jazz Happened about the situation in the era of the Beatles: "By the mid-1960s, the pop-rock market was so lucrative that many record companies shifted their resources away from less profitable divisions, like jazz. In the early rock era, the youth market increasingly viewed jazz as overly sophisticated and glum, played by musicians who tended to be puzzlingly temperamental and withdrawn. Jazz's market now was found in cities, among introspective intellectuals who seemed to revel in the music's rarified and exclusionary status." Jazz may have been smelling funny for a long time, but it's taking a heck of a time to die!

Monty Monty's Double Montezuma

"Remember that in its determination to confront conformity and stereotype much of that music deliberately throws out or disguises the things most people recognise as music - recognisable melody (in the sense of tunes), a danceable beat, standard harmony." (Lark Ascending) Exactly. My 26-year-old daughter who likes chart pops says the music I play is "just a jumble of sounds" - and that's the Criss Cross "easy listening" you mentioned, Bev!

Sounds like a fair assessment.

I don't think that jazz doesn't appeal to "those people" because "there is a huge entertainment deficit in today's jazz." Rather, as I think you suggest, it's because the kinds of musical entertainment they prefer already amply satisfy their desires to" just ... have fun." If I'm already having lots of fun, why would I go in search of some other ways to do that? Pondering these problems, there's always a temptation to say that jazz such as it is needs to be significantly other than it is, and then we might be OK. Not that the various ways that jazz is nowadays ought to be regarded with complacency, but my experience over the years has been that if we try to gee up the music's supposed "entertainment deficit," we then won't be OK, or that much better off, in terms of popularity, we'll just have some more music that no one will care that much about or remember after a short while. Hey, what about Windham Hill? That was supposed to be our salvation at one point. ​BTW, that is not to dismiss the important practical points that Allen Lowe made in post #34. I agree that jazz should not be watered down to try to appeal to a mass audience. However, even in my lifetime I can remember Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Sun Ra emphasizing an entertainment aspect in their shows, or at least a lively, friendly interaction with the audience. Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon and Carla Bley had large personalities and some people went to see them partly to hear their between song comments and just to see them. I am not aware of anything like that today. I can't name any jazz artist who presents an entertaining, engaging or compelling onstage personality, or who makes their shows entertaining. There are no jazz artists that I can think of who would generate a comment like "oh, he or she is really cool" from a member of the general public. I'll add another name to your list of artists who "entertain": Pharoah Sanders. He kept a (for jazz) relatively youthful audience well entertained with singing. dancing and clowning (as well as playing superlative tenor) when I saw him at Manchester's Band on the Wall a couple of years ago - but, of course, he belongs to that older generation whom you've listed. Of younger Americans whom I've seen recently - Eric Alexander, Jim Rotondi, Gary Smulyan - there was nothing for those who weren't already committed to the music - which was great, of course. The one exception I can think of from today's guys is Britain's Alan Barnes, a world class saxophonist who, as Bev says, could earn his living as a stand-up comedian if he didn't have the music.

William Faulkner George Farquhar The Fockers

Jimmy Mundy Everton Weekes Red Callender

George Gale Joey Tempest Toby Flood

Jodie Foster David Cronenberg Karl Lagerfeld

I see Foyles have moved a hundred yards or so in Charing Cross Road to the former St Martin's School of Art premises. Surprisingly, they're still listing Ray's Jazz as one of their features. They've probably relegated it to a broom cupboard! http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Stores/Detail.aspx?storeid=1011