Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore

[clifford_thornton]

Brule on Cool

[David Ayers]

In jazz or jazz legacy musics isn't it simply the case that there is over-supply of musicians and recordings. There is interest in and audience for 'jazz', just not enough for everyone who wants to make a living from it. Jazz isn't dead, far from it, but there is more than anyone wants. As I am always saying, the ardent advocates of 'jazz' are basically musicians and record collectors - and neither is a particularly cool demographic.

[A Lark Ascending]

Depends what is meant by 'cool'. Kids use it to mean 'fashionable', in tune with the current zeitgeist (which is largely commercially controlled).

Yet it has also meant 'ahead of the crowd', canny enough to see past current fashion, the culture of the knowing outsider.

Using the first definition it's not been 'cool' for decades - and given that it is largely* controlled or mediated by middle-aged to older people (who are more interested in projecting it as 'Art'), it doesn't stand much of a chance of becoming 'cool' again.

Use the second and...well, you create your own 'cool'.

[*Always lots of activity by young musicians, often interacting with contemporary rock/pop, but it always seems to go so far and then either dissolve or just get absorbed into the jazz mainstream)

[AllenLowe]

well, after looking at that Disney clip, I've decided to retire.

[david weiss]

The debate about this has been raging amongst my "friends" on Facebook with some dissenters actually......

The response to those are now on Payton's blog

My link

Enjoy......

[Hardbopjazz]

Some more on this subject

I agree with a lot of what Bret is saying.

Edited December 5, 2011 by Hardbopjazz

[Noj]

One of the major obstacles facing jazz is a lot of people don't care about instrumental music, and are only interested in singing. Many sort of get it, but they're really only interested in it in support of vocals, and won't listen to anything beyond an electric guitar solo. Even then, they're just waiting for the sing-along to return.

Those who hear the instruments and care about the sounds coming from every member of the band have different ears and a more heightened sense of music. Fans of jazz care more, simple as that.

I really think that's a huge issue. A lot of people don't actually like music. They like singing. They relate to what they can sing along with and learn the words to. Or what they can rap along to. They couldn't care less about virtuoso instrumental ability.

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know. There's this established core of music they grew up with, which reminds them of good times, and learning new songs is too much work. Anything foreign or unusual isn't acceptable. Easy-to-learn sing-along music, that's what's "cool." It better not be too challenging to learn, and had better establish itself quickly in forced doses if it wants to earn a spot in the rotation.

One lady I heard listening to jazz uttered with exasperation, "learn the tune already." That's the extent of her patience for improvisation and variations on a theme.

[seeline]

Anyone else take a look at some of Payton's other posts?

There's a lot of anger, frustration and vitriol... very sad.

[JSngry]

[Big Wheel]

Anyone else take a look at some of Payton's other posts?

There's a lot of anger, frustration and vitriol... very sad.

Well...I took a look at Marcus Strickland's public facebook post that seems to have been the match that set off the latest round. On the one hand, if THAT is really what Payton is reacting to, his reaction seems pretty over the top. Strickland is pretty straightforwardly talking past Payton, and unless I'm missing some context here is not being at all insulting.

On the other hand, as someone who basically started a fight between Bill Summers and Jason Marsalis about issues related to this, I think it would be wrong to ignore the New Orleans context that Payton is operating under here. If you hold the views Payton does, it must be enormously challenging to be a resident of Marsalisland in New Orleans and have to put up with a scene that imposes these kinds of definitions on everything for popular consumption, while not known for being particularly friendly to dissenting ideas on these kinds of meta-issues.

[Big Wheel]

I'll see your Mike Tyson and raise you a

If Black Music had a Godwin's Law, it has now been violated.

[Big Beat Steve]

One of the major obstacles facing jazz is a lot of people don't care about instrumental music, and are only interested in singing. Many sort of get it, but they're really only interested in it in support of vocals, and won't listen to anything beyond an electric guitar solo. Even then, they're just waiting for the sing-along to return.

Those who hear the instruments and care about the sounds coming from every member of the band have different ears and a more heightened sense of music. Fans of jazz care more, simple as that.

I really think that's a huge issue. A lot of people don't actually like music. They like singing. They relate to what they can sing along with and learn the words to. Or what they can rap along to. They couldn't care less about virtuoso instrumental ability.

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know. There's this established core of music they grew up with, which reminds them of good times, and learning new songs is too much work. Anything foreign or unusual isn't acceptable. Easy-to-learn sing-along music, that's what's "cool." It better not be too challenging to learn, and had better establish itself quickly in forced doses if it wants to earn a spot in the rotation.

One lady I heard listening to jazz uttered with exasperation, "learn the tune already." That's the extent of her patience for improvisation and variations on a theme.

:tup

[Big Wheel]

I really think that's a huge issue. A lot of people don't actually like music. They like singing. They relate to what they can sing along with and learn the words to. Or what they can rap along to. They couldn't care less about virtuoso instrumental ability.

This. I have a friend whose brother is an accomplished jazz drummer, and though she does have an appreciation for (almost entirely "inside") jazz, her real passions are with the singer/songwriter and indie sides of things. This is a person who is well educated, cultured, and a voracious reader, but when she listens to music, what really speaks to her is basically the fact that it's just very catchy poetry, the more raw and obvious the emotions involved, the better. Radiohead good, Nina Simone good, Joni Mitchell good, Steely Dan bad.

Very bad, as I found out playing some for her, thinking "well, this person claims to dig Wayne Shorter and jazz in general, has no aversion to the better pop music of the 1970s, and is generally into highbrow shit, so she should be all over Aja." No. The hipness of the arrangements, the textures involved, turn out to have no bearing whatsoever on what she likes. If it has words and yet doesn't fall within the parameters of sung poetry dealing with a very specific set of themes common to 99% of all popular music made since 1920, it sucks. Period.

Edited December 5, 2011 by Big Wheel

[Hardbopjazz]

One of the major obstacles facing jazz is a lot of people don't care about instrumental music, and are only interested in singing. Many sort of get it, but they're really only interested in it in support of vocals, and won't listen to anything beyond an electric guitar solo. Even then, they're just waiting for the sing-along to return.

Those who hear the instruments and care about the sounds coming from every member of the band have different ears and a more heightened sense of music. Fans of jazz care more, simple as that.

I really think that's a huge issue. A lot of people don't actually like music. They like singing. They relate to what they can sing along with and learn the words to. Or what they can rap along to. They couldn't care less about virtuoso instrumental ability.

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know. There's this established core of music they grew up with, which reminds them of good times, and learning new songs is too much work. Anything foreign or unusual isn't acceptable. Easy-to-learn sing-along music, that's what's "cool." It better not be too challenging to learn, and had better establish itself quickly in forced doses if it wants to earn a spot in the rotation.

One lady I heard listening to jazz uttered with exasperation, "learn the tune already." That's the extent of her patience for improvisation and variations on a theme.

So is this some form of evolution/de-evolution with the listening audience? At one point when jazz was the pop music of the day, a large portion of the music was instrumental. People were listening and going to the clubs to hear the music live. At what point did the shift to the audience wanting to hear music with words? I agree the lack of words plays a large part why jazz isn't popular. It could also be how the big music companies promote music.

[Dan Gould]

By the time people were going to the clubs to hear the music, jazz had lost its claim as being the popular music of the day. It was the popular music of the day when it accompanied dancers. As instrumental or vocal music. At the same time there was plenty of pop music that was all about vocals - Bing Crosby, Sinatra etc etc etc.

Certainly the R&B/rock era saw a simplification of the music accompanying the vocalist.

[David Ayers]

I guess one thing you guys might want to recall if you are talking about singing is that modern jazz is basically derived from song. Most jazz standards are 32-bar show tunes. If you look for standards that are not originally songs the field narrows, and if you look for standards that are neither songs nor in song form, then we could have a short thread on that, maybe.

[JSngry]

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know.

Change "songs" to "styles", or even "sounds", and I think you can apply this to most fans of all musics. Most people hit on one or two bags they did, and then spend the rest of their life hanging with them and not really feeling the need to go anywhere else.

That's not intrinsically "bad" in and of itself, but it is the reality of audiences, and, really, not just in music.

[JSngry]

Oh yeah, one more thing, to keep it strictly on the trumpet tip after reading Payton's latest - the life (and music, if you care to separate them) of Lester Bowie makes the words (and music, if you care to get that harsh about it) of Nicholas Payton so much historically ignorant babble.

Then again, pretty much everything emanating from the post-Wynton school of jazzthought reduces down to that. Great Black Music: From The Ancient To The Future gets narrowed down to Great Black American Music: From 1900-1969 (or in Payton's case, 1959).

Fools, all of them, these post-Wynton "guardians of the heritage". They've been given a universe and they've decided to stay in one wing in one house, and to close it off. And then the arguments begin about who to let in and who to keep out, and, oh by the way, nobody really cares any more because everybody else is too busy living in the rest of the house in the rest of the universe.

Can't nobody say that they didn't know about Great Black Music: From The Ancient To The Future. They just chose to not pay heed.

Somebody slap these fools upside their collective heads. Please.

[7/4]

One of the major obstacles facing jazz is a lot of people don't care about instrumental music, and are only interested in singing. Many sort of get it, but they're really only interested in it in support of vocals, and won't listen to anything beyond an electric guitar solo. Even then, they're just waiting for the sing-along to return.

Those who hear the instruments and care about the sounds coming from every member of the band have different ears and a more heightened sense of music. Fans of jazz care more, simple as that.

I really think that's a huge issue. A lot of people don't actually like music. They like singing. They relate to what they can sing along with and learn the words to. Or what they can rap along to. They couldn't care less about virtuoso instrumental ability.

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know. There's this established core of music they grew up with, which reminds them of good times, and learning new songs is too much work. Anything foreign or unusual isn't acceptable. Easy-to-learn sing-along music, that's what's "cool." It better not be too challenging to learn, and had better establish itself quickly in forced doses if it wants to earn a spot in the rotation.

One lady I heard listening to jazz uttered with exasperation, "learn the tune already." That's the extent of her patience for improvisation and variations on a theme.

Noj nails it.

[Noj]

So is this some form of evolution/de-evolution with the listening audience? At one point when jazz was the pop music of the day, a large portion of the music was instrumental. People were listening and going to the clubs to hear the music live. At what point did the shift to the audience wanting to hear music with words? I agree the lack of words plays a large part why jazz isn't popular. It could also be how the big music companies promote music.

A big portion of the listening audience that enjoyed jazz instrumentals enjoyed it for dancing. That dance crowd now follows an ever-evolving dance scene. The rave scene. The beat doesn't quit, and jazz has increasingly become less about the beat.

In addition, many people only want to hear the songs they already know.

Change "songs" to "styles", or even "sounds", and I think you can apply this to most fans of all musics. Most people hit on one or two bags they did, and then spend the rest of their life hanging with them and not really feeling the need to go anywhere else.

That's not intrinsically "bad" in and of itself, but it is the reality of audiences, and, really, not just in music.

So that's when jazz lost it. When it stopped being about singing/words, or at least really trying to sell a lyrical theme. When it stopped being the hippest, newest thing to dance to.

Look at the "jazzy" groups that do gain some sort of popularity: Kenny G-type bland instrumental pop (the people still hear the lyrics in their head and can pretty much karaoke along). Singers, who usually aren't all that hard on the eyes either (Jane Monheit, Norah Jones, etc.). Rap/neosoul infused with "jazzy" elements in support of lyrics.

[JSngry]

But let's remember that there was a ongoing, sustainable circuit for live jazz after bebop, after the emphasis went away from dancing and vocals and all that good stuff. Blakey, Silver, Miles, Chico Hamilton, Coltrane, Cannonball, plenty folks, these were all road bands. They didn't just stay in New York, play Birdland/The Vanguard and hole up at Rudy's making records, they hit the road and went across a big portion of (mostly) urban America, where there enough of an audience to sustain their efforts up to anywhere from in between the mid-60s to the mid-70s, after which only the BIG stars could keep a road band. And let's not forget the organ groups. Let's definitely not forget the organ groups.

Hell, I saw Kenny Burrell in a club in Houston in 1975. He had a road band - Richard Wyands, etc. No vocals, no dancing. But there were songs, and you could pat your foot and/or shake your ass. and there were people in the house, more than a few.

OTOH, most of the big bands stayed alive by doing concerts and dances both. I once heard the Kenton band at a dance after hearing them 4-5 times in a concert setting, and it was amazing how different the experience was...

No real point here other than that if "jazz" wants to be strictly an "art music", then its audience will not be found is "social music" environments and vice-versa, so adjust plans and expectations accordingly.

Me, though, I always liked it when the music had a "middle ground" that managed to be enough of both at the same time so that there was a continuity from the most "far out" to the worst "sell out".

[Larry Kart]

Certainly don't want to fall into the silly trick bag that Mr. Payton has constructed, but Noj's interesting post raises an I think interesting question: Why do people who do actually like music in the sense he describes -- i.e. they don't just like singing per se or, as Jim added, a particular familiar style or two -- come to really like music and remain hungry for it, explore new pathways for a long time, maybe to the end? Is it training? Exposure? Or is it more or less something in the person in embryo that begins to grow almost no matter what? (Before I go on a bit, I'll add an observation that sociologist David Reisman made in the mid-1950s. Examining taste, he asked some girls at a local record store why they liked the current No. 1 hit. They replied: "We like it because it's popular.")

In any case, arguing from my own early experience (insofar as I understand it) and from that of friends, I essentially vote for the admittedly mysterious "it's more or less something in the person in embryo" option. I can point to a few personal experiences that may contain some clues.

My mother was a genuine music lover -- when she listened I could virtually see the music moving through her and could feel her reaching out to it. And that, without me being able to put it into words, gave me the feeling that for her music was an alternate language, that it "said" things that she hungered for and sought and that weren't being said/couldn't be said in words in this world. To put it another way, looking at things from the other end of the telescope, I felt the tie between her and say Mozart was that she knew why he'd troubled himself to assemble those sounds, that he too was reaching out, speaking an alternate language, and that they both knew that music, while made of things of this world, was not wholly a material matter, and that it was above all not essentially a medium of exchange -- a la Reisman's girls in the record store or my father going with my mother to hear the Chicago Symphony because in large part (if I'm not being unfair to him) doing so was a medium of exchange for him, a way of validating his sense of the kind of person he wanted to be socially. Back to my mother -- not to get too sentimental, but one of her favorite songs was one her mother (who had lovely contralto voice) sang as she did the dishes or cooked, a setting of a Robert Burns poem that goes: "My heart's in the mountains, out chasing a deer, my heart's in the mountains, my heart is not here." I know, that seems to take us back to songs per se, and words, but that piece as music would be about what those words say (and more) even if there were no words present.

Experience two: When I glommed onto jazz in the summer between seventh and eight grade, I think I liked what I liked for most or all of the usual reasons. And part of it was my version of "this is my/our music," a way of validating my and my friends' social segregation, so to speak. At the same time, and probably operating on the same social-segregation principle, plus some underlying sense of psychological development , my 13-year-old self couldn't stand most classical music, especially anything with strings; I thought it was all akin to Mantovani, that contact with it would full your soul with sugar, and that you would then more or less melt way the next time it rained. In other words, it was a music alien to the world of say, Roy Eldridge or Illinois Jacquet, with its muscle-flexing demonstrations of strength and power and soulfulness. But then I happened to put on a recording of one of the Mozart String Quintets, K. 593, and the doors to so-called classical music opened once and for all. A lot more stories in that realm (especially when it came later on to encounters with the Second Viennese school) but the point I want to make is that the music simultaneously reached out to me and I to it -- or so I felt; the music taught me to listen to it, but I embryonically very much wanted to be told, without knowing so until I was.

Likewise, a bit earlier on, when my best friend and I glomming onto the 1940-1 Ellington Band. This was for sure not the music of 1955-6 (in jazz terms that might have been the contemporary Basie band, which we loved), although 1940-1 Ellington didn't sound archaic; ithe appeal of this music to us wasn't that it was strange or had an aura of nostalgia to it, just that things like "Ko Ko" and "Concerto for Cootie" and "Harlem Airshaft" and "Jack the Bear" were musically and emotionally-dramatically stunning, that again in effect they reached out and taught us that here was not only excitement but also, for want of a better term, "depth," that this was a music one could listen to time and again and think about.

One last note, perhaps circling back to my original point: We wanted/needed a music we could think about, into which we in our own way could try to pour as much of our dawning understanding of who we were and how the world worked (and didn't work) as the musicians who made this music had poured into it to begin with.

[A Lark Ascending]

Strangely enough the brand name 'jazz' is still used to denote 'cool' when advertising other products.

[JSngry]

And that's symptomatic of what, as it turns out, is Payton's real beef/point/whatever - that the whole notion of "jazz" has been co-opted to sell a "reality" that has absolutely nothing to do with what the music originally was/still is/should be, as per his perception, and that the more that "jazz" allows it to be tied to that reality, the more it loses its original reality, and the more its practitioners are returned to functioning within the "colonialist" social mentality which it originally confronted and ultimately defeated (although not nearly as much as he and others would like to believe,,,).

It's not that he's wrong about any of that, I mean, the essence of it is something I believed then and now. It's just that he's making it from a point of reference that is terribly limited musically and historically, like he's figting a battle that has already been fought and won, and he's having to do so because he's accepted a version of reality that does not accept those who have already created the reality that he wants to get to. Again - as long as Nicholas Payton wants to position himself as The Great Awakener, Lester Bowie (to keep it in the trumpet family) renders him completely irrelevant.

But the fool mentions damn near everybody except Lester Bowie (and company), as if they're somebodies and someplaces that he wants to avoid at all costs.

Willful ignorance gets no sympathy from me, and this is definitely willful ignorance.

[cih]

it's not just the particular style or song that the less 'involved' music fan goes for but very much the specific performer, which would perhaps contribute to the fact that songs, or singers are popular - because they are more explicitly present in the recording. Hence people screaming at the Beatles (or BB King) and teenagers moping around believing Morrissey is the only one who understands them. In my experience, from people I know, they go for artists who come from a similar social background to themselves - its a perculiar sort of patriotism, the singer is their spokesperson or something. The accomplished musician is alien... actually, there's a lot of class snobbery in music audiences - and ironically most jazz would be regarded as too exclusive.

That blog has some strange things on it, but, personally speaking, its stuff like:

Our whole purpose on this planet is to evolve.

that ruffles my own feathers most

and

As a postmodern musician, it’s my duty to do better than my predecessors...

It’s called evolution.

no it's not!