The jazz audience can be described by its parts: hip, participatory young artist/musicians, less experienced and cost-conscious but willing social butterflies, mid-aged and older cultural omnivores and dull-but-desirable comfort seekers, according to a segmentation study sponsored by the Jazz Audience Initiative.
Some of this has been reported by NPR’s A Blog Supreme as “Actually Useful Information About the Jazz Audience” (thanks, Patrick Jarenwattananon), but these categories which the study used to characterize the varied behavior of the music’s purported audience slivers for discussion at a “jazz leadership” convening last week by Columbus, Ohio’s Jazz Arts Group have not previously been publicized.I was privileged to be in the room as Alan S. Brown, researcher and
principal of WolfBrown, the segmentation study’s author, presented a chart-packed slide show breaking out research findings for the benefit of a powerful if incomplete cross-section of U.S. jazz organizations. Also at the meeting: representatives from Jazz at Lincoln Center, Monterey Jazz Festival, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild Jazz, AllAboutJazz.com, Chamber Music America, the Jazz Education Network, Jazz St. Louis, University of Michigan’s University Musical Society, Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts as well as the Jazz Artists Group’s flagship Columbus Jazz Orchestra and Ben Cameron, program director for the arts of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which has funded the Jazz Audience Initiative at the level of $200,000 over 21 months.
The study itself, described by project director Christy Farnbauch as a foot thick if it were to be printed, will instead be posted in its entirety online in an estimated six weeks; some of the pie charts and figures showing that the jazz audience is a fractious and/or many splendored thing were unveiled at a town-hall meeting at the Association of Performing Artists convention in New York City last January. Data compiled by sampling ticket buyers of a bulging handfull of major jazz venues plus “potential” jazz fan/ticket buyers living in Central Ohio arrive at several conclusions which seem intuitive once they are expressed, yet easier to label than act upon. Among them:
- Audiences prefer to hear jazz in small venues affording opportunities to socialize
- Jazz has entry points from other musics (classical, rock, blue grass) so booking jazz bands with other ensembles playing in different genres is a way to attract otherwise disengaged audiences
- Some listeners enjoy and participate in “contextualization” (such as pre- and post-concert discussions) but others don’t, or prefer to lurk silently
- Jazz fans are most motivated to buy tickets when the musician is someone they want to hear . . .
- Young audiences defy genre or style restrictions (so they claim) and just like whatever they like
- People are most receptive to music recommendations from friends or family, tend to like what they’ve heard recently, and are exposed to a lot of newly released music on the radio . . .
Yes — but the point of this convening was to urge attendees to consider the finding’s implications especially in regards to jazz presentation, and to come up with suggested practices with the twined goals of growing and deepening the jazz audience, and selling tickets to specific jazz events. A glimpse of the data reveals how at odds those goals might be in the minds of traditional presenting organizations, since the fresh and energized jazz audience wants kinetic experiences in intimate settings especially if access is cheap (or better yet, free), while the established yet dwindling crowd isn’t all that esthetically adventurous but enjoys a nice night out on the town and has the money to pay for it.
For an enterprise like the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, a paradox revolves around its investment in a swing-oriented though stylistically flexible big band, performing a popular but paid-ticket outdoor series at the Columbus Zoo and also a concert series at two relatively large historic, refurbished theaters. Programming tries hard to appeal across a spectrum of Columbus’s 787,000 population; in 2011-2012 there are shows focused on banned and controversial tunes, on guest artist Kevin Eubanks, on winter holiday favorites, on the music of Ray Charles, on a collaboration with a ballet company, a commission for trombonist Wycliff Gordon, the ’20s sounds of the Cotton Club, “the legends of Soul” and the Harmony Project (a choir). They broadcast some concerts on WOSU, the Ohio State University’s classical fm station.
But to enlarge and improve the audience experience and sell more tickets should the Columbus Jazz Orchestra produce more off-site events featuring unaffiliated musicians or imported groups of non-big band style? Can it partner more with classical, hip-hop or blue grass ensembles, have more multi-media collaborations, offer enlightening (no-charge?) meet-ups and talks before big deal concerts or after them — in person or online? Should it incentivize ticket sales with two-for-one deals, coupons for extra values, hosted jam sessions, “compromised” curatorial standards? If these moves get the CJO into the mix, will that mix support it?
Some of the larger jazz institutions — the Monterey Jazz Festival, say, or Jazz at Lincoln Center — can ignore the report’s findings, as they operate under unique conditions. However, the problem for the small venues — whether non-profit or frankly commercial — that have the hot action rising audiences want is that their rents are going up, overhead for musicians’ travel and lodging puts out-of-towners out-of-price-range, old forms of marketing and promotion have failed while new forms are not yet in place. Jazz clubs, never very stable businesses, are drying up by the dive-full. They can’t produce off-site, they don’t have $ for enrichment programs, they might do alright from food and booze charges but not if they get serious about the music — unless they have independent funding sources like John Zorn’s The Stone in Manhattan, or ongoing funding campaigns like Philadelphia’s floating Ars Nova Workshop or schedules that appeal to well-heeled patrons who want nostalgia or traditionalism, draw a lot of tourists (like Preservation Hall in New Orleans) or have favorable circumstances like being located inside a hotel (the Cafe Carlyle in NYC, Scullers Jazz Club in Boston).
There’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for “solving” the puzzle of attracting the right audience for every venue, and the survey’s categories are useful only to identify that there are several audiences within the amorphous community that identifies itself with jazz. Data can be interpreted in many ways, and the more people see the Jazz Audience Initiative’s survey results, the more discussion will ensue.
Experienced jazz fans will recognize the segmentations and tensions between them from past eras. Here are the flappers who liked “hot jazz” 
and the businessman who preferred Paul Whiteman’s 
bounce. Swing players vs. beboppers vs. moldy figs — the cool school compared to hard bop a la the Jazz Messengers — “free jazz” fighting neo-conservatism. The mostly male hipster musicians and mostly female social butterflies should find each other and popularize certain informal, dark venues — until they mature enough to settle together and tend their recording collections (plus the kids), then eventually become old folks who just want to hear what they liked when they met. Having survey distinctions about what each segment’s preferences are may help presenters narrow in on what they need to do to get those segments to their jazz offerings. Until all the Jazz Audience Initiative’s data is offered for all comers to peruse, the wise jazz presenter will depend on their ears to the ground.
Howard,
Great article, but I thought it that it should be noted that market research is only useful in support of marketing activity–or, most ideally, marketing thinking. The segments presented here mesh very well with the other research done on jazz audiences, but they will only be useful if jazz producers strt thinking like marketers.
To do act like a marketer, they should at least ask:
1) How big is each segment locally? Is there an available and desireable segment?
2) How great is the segment’s appetite to participate?
3) How well is that segment being served? What could be done better?
4) How can my organization best serve that segment?
Few organization’s are large enough to serve them all. In Chicago, for example, the largest available segments are the one’s least connected to jazz. As such, they are harder to attract and there is greater competition for their dollar. To attract them, promoters will have to know them. That, sadly, has been frowned upon. As a result, most go to Lollapallooza and eschew the Jazz Fest.
Some organizations serve one segment or niche very well but have too few fans to make money–like the avante garde club “The Velvet Lounge” on the near South Side. Great club, the booking of the top avante garde talent is assured night after night, and it has a cool history, but it is only lightly attended because avante garde jazz is not seen as attractive by the largest segments. Because they are well-served, the Velvet’s tiny audience is not one that most other producers would want to compete for.
The most successful small pure jazz venues serve larger, more competetive segments and know (perhaps intuitively) what they have to do to kepp their jazz fans happy, The Green Mill, for example, is always busier than the Velvet and it competes with the busy Jazz Showcase. The segment is large enough to have multiple players, but it is still small.
To really grow the jazz audince rather than just serving the most accessible existing well-defined and committed segments, look to Montreal rather than Monterey. That big group of 2.5 million folks who like festivals and are more comfortable with other kinds of music come in droves, and many of them hear a little jazz, too. Monterey, which has more like 40,000 attendees, is more pure jazz, but how many new fans does it create?
If you are not creating new fans, how can you build an audience?
Great article, but I thought it that it should be noted that market research is only useful in support of marketing activity–or, most ideally, marketing thinking. The segments presented here mesh very well with the other research done on jazz audiences, but they will only be useful if jazz producers start thinking like marketers.
To do act like a marketer, they should at least ask:
1) How big is each segment locally? Is there an available and desirable segment?
2) How great is the segment’s appetite to participate?
3) How well is that segment being served? What could be done better?
4) How can my organization best serve that segment?
Few organizations are large enough to serve them all. In Chicago, for example, the largest available segments are the one’s least connected to jazz. As such, they are harder to attract and there is greater competition for their dollar. To attract them, promoters will have to know them. That, sadly, has been frowned upon. As a result, most go to Lollapallooza and eschew the Jazz Fest.
Some organizations serve one segment or niche very well but have too few fans to make money–like the avante garde club “The Velvet Lounge” on the near South Side. Great club, the booking of the top avante garde talent is assured night after night, and it has a cool history, but it is only lightly attended because avante garde jazz is not seen as attractive by the largest segments. Because they are well-served, the Velvet’s tiny audience is not one that most other producers would want to compete for.
The most successful small pure jazz venues serve larger, more competitive segments and know (perhaps intuitively) what they have to do to keep their jazz fans happy, The Green Mill, for example, is always busier than the Velvet and it competes with the busy Jazz Showcase. The segment is large enough to have multiple players, but it is still small.
To really grow the jazz audience rather than just serving the most accessible existing well-defined and committed segments, look to Montreal rather than Monterey. That big group of 2.5 million folks who like festivals and are more comfortable with other kinds of music come in droves, and many of them hear a little jazz, too. Monterey, which has more like 40,000 attendees, is more pure jazz, but how many new fans does it create?
If you are not creating new fans, how can you build an audience?
Thanks for this analysis, Jim. Note, though, that the segments I reported as delineated by the study are of jazz event ticket buyers, not general populations or attendees of free festivals, so I think your reference to the audience segment “least connected to jazz” and so going to Lollapalooza at the expense of the Jazz Festival warrants further discussion.
You do indeed take it to the next step with those four questions. And the answers must be provided by each presenter, with regard to the specifics of their own situations. The Velvet Lounge as an example strikes me as an odd one (though it may become more common): a venue with a strong focus reaching capacity yet unable to sustain economic viability — did it need more seats to encompass a growing audience that would have brought them more $? More experienced and committed management after Fred Anderson’s death? and so on (An alternative study might be of the evolution of Buddy Guy’s Legends, starting from when it first moved from its south side origins as the Checkerboard Lounge).
As for the Chicago Jazz Fest looking to Montreal as a model, I don’t see it. Montreal’s strong, private festival infrastructure was built on oodles of cigarette money over some two decades — the Chicago jazz fest has never had that kind of financial base and independence from the City to grow a similar way. Montreal has also established itself as an international marketplace/showcase for popular touring acts that allude to jazz without being jazz, which isn’t the Chicago mission — and the Montreal fest is distinctly not a free benefit of citizenship, it’s a commercial tourist juggernaut. In baance, Montreal does not have the flourishing day-in-day-out jazz scene Chicago has, and with which Chicago is all the richer. To my mind, the model of a successful city-wide jazz fest is New Orleans. The NOJHF has been a regionally expansive yet -centric, community-realized and broadly enriching event that was never dominated by a single financial source and has welcomed the entirety of an enormous audience for democratic low fees. It has polished the New Orleans Jazz brand as Chicago, with its glorious history and implacable stamp, might be able to do, but Montreal doesn’t (does anyone identify Montreal-style jazz?)
There are two points that I’d like to examine a bit more: The Velvet’s market and the realizability of a more marketable free festival for Chicago.
The Velvet ‘s page, which still exists after it’s demise, explains that “Fred Anderson opened the Velvet Lounge as a home for jazz musicians to perform without commerical constraints.” My understanding is that it closed because the commercial contraints of paying its lease and staff could not be addressed with the revenue it brought in. It was mission-based but it never became a stable non-profit enterprise. In short, it was not sustainable business–either in the world of commercial clubs or as a non-profit entity for a varirty of reasons. You can blame it on management, pricing, capacity or whatever but I would point first and foremost to the smallish, price-sensitive audience as its primary problem.
Buddy Guy’s demonstrates the power of the opposite scenario–a large, stable audience that happily consumes contemporary (rock-influenced blues) stuff as part of the mix. It also competes with at least five similarly sized blues clubs, the House of Blues and many other clubs that present blues acts. You can argue that blues–as presented here–has a larger popular following–but that is not something written in stone. Jazz could have such an audience, I believe, if the jazz community wanted such a thing and were willing to compromise in pursuit of it.
I agree that NOJHF is a better example in many ways, but I would argue that while Chicago should learn from them and from Montreal, the real work should be about building its own locally appropriate approach with the goal of building and exciting ever-larger audiences. I think imitation may be flattering but it is not the best way to create important, exciting and sustainable art or art programming. Programming a festival or a series of festival requires a high level of artistry in itself, something I do not pretend to have. I do believe that festivals should, however, have cleraly stated goals that help them to be sustainable.
Over the years, I have noticed that acts like Brad Mehldau and Madeline Peyroux draw larger crowds from the less jazz-centric community than the more avante garde acts. I think anything that encourages more people to come see the acts that people see as more personally relevent is the key. How we do that while creating new avenues for the other forms of jazz is where the argument needs to take place.
It is probably obvious by now but I, personally, am less of a big fan of presenting the whole panolpoly in the interest of being “fair” across the forms than I am a fan of presenting music that draws and excites the segments that are most likely to grow into more serious jazz fans as they experience more jazz that they like. The “fairness” approach seems to me to try to do too much too fast, and in doing so creates strong disincentives to participate.
The most relevent arts research ever done points to this when it showed that in terms of participation the fear of a bad experience is vastly more powerful than the promise of a good experience. Boiled down, I believe that people come to festivals to have fun–to enjoy the festival atmosphere along with the music. The better that experience is, the more likely they will be to try to recreate it in smaller venues and to seek out other forms of music.
Thanks for such a thorough and thoughtful analysis/diagnosis, Jim. I’d like to carry the conversation a bit further —
The Jazz Institute of Chicago should be roundly applauded and generously, continuously funded to sustain a unique jazz fest that considering financial circumstances and imposed limitations suits as it is quite serves Chicago well. I agree, Jim, that numerous other fest models should be consulted as points of comparison and for ideas that might be adapted, but not that their formats should be imitated outright. Each festival I’ve been at presents its own challenges, each city has its own strengths and each curated schedule is based on some specific leverage, circumstances.
Acts that attract different audiences than usual aren’t necessarily bad, but nor are they all equal in their relationship to the main themes a fest might represent. I may or may not like Brad Mehldau’s playing, but he’s a pretty much inarguably a jazz pianist, working in a recognizably traditional format. He personally happens to be a musician who is attractive to other people his age and seems to have a higher profile among them than some of his peers (stylistic and age-defined). Madeleine Peyroux — she’s a singer andsongwriter who says she likes jazz and has sung some jazz songs, but I hear little connection to blues or jazz in her original music, in her interpretations, in her rhythmic approach, in the values and strategies of her music as she presents it. That may just be me — but I don’t think the people who turn out to hear her necessarily are brought closer to the rest of jazz through her work. If people of that nature are booked at the Jazz Fest, I’d personally prefer if they made a point of connecting with jazz in some form in their sets. If the fest in 2010 had a Billie Holiday theme and booked Madeleine to perform her Holiday-related songbook — as well as Nnennah Freelon to sing her versions, other vocalists doing related repertoire and tributes, I think the argument for booking a singer songwriter like Peyroux would be stronger. If the fest just intends to offer a smorgasbord of who’s on tour, calling themselves more-or-less jazz because they’re not rockers, after all, or hip-hoppers or “classical” musicians, and the fest gets a Madeleine Peyroux — well, it’s not a catastrophe, though I think it’s less interesting than the fest giving that stage-slot to a local musician whose daring enough to try something different and new.
This is not to say mainstage festival performances are necessarily appropriate venues for experimentation. A fest can present experimentation at smaller stages, in more intimate circumstances, for the scale of audience that may genuinely be interested. The Chicago jazz fest has done that at side stages on Jackson Street in years past.
People may not want bad experiences — and too much avant-garde music like too much trad music or too much pop music can be a bad experience. The Chicago Jazz Fest has always featured a variety of jazz, all styles. I didn’t think that was for “fairness” sake but rather the mission of the JIC. A “bad experience” at the Chicago Jazz Fest, though, is not being able to park, not being able to see or hear, getting robbed, disliking the food, being unable to get to bathrooms, things like that — not one particular set of 50 minutes that the particular patron doesn’t like, but maybe someone else does.
As for Fred Anderson — he may have been overly idealistic and self-negatingly non-commercial when he opened the Velvet Lounge, but the Velvet had many things going for it which might have allowed it to develop into a self-sustaining operation had better management taken advantage. The small, price-sensitive audience works for places like The Stone in Manhattan — and the Velvet wasn’t even that small, it did have a bar to make $ from (which the Stone doesn’t, by dictate of its principal John Zorn, another idealistic though better-funded-than Fred musician).
The Velvet Lounge had an extraordinary strong international name, and might have morphed into presenting itself online, selling video access, products such as live cds, etc. Yes, its audience had its limits — but “compromising” the music would not have turned it into a popular item (cf. Albert Ayler’s late Impulse! albums). True, a different music might have changed it’s income potential but that would have changed the entire reason for having the club.
I agree that the jazz community may not really want the audience that Buddy Guy’s blues club wants — but I think it’s an enormous fallacy to say “jazz could be more popular if jazz would be different.” I think the more useful model to attract a larger but related audience is to promote double-header bookings that emphasized crossovers between blues and free jazz, alt-rockers and free jazzers, gospel choirs and AACM-associated musicians, compositional chamber music and what Fred presented.
What Fred Anderson himself personified was an unbending commitment to music just as he personally played it. He may have been mistaken to follow that path so determinedly, but that’s what he did and deciding to add a riffing horn section, hip-hop beats, cooing backup singers, bling-in-the-presentation, bebop standards and ballads or some other standardization of repertoire (though he played the same himself every night, unwinding one lifelong solo) would have undercut the very discipline audiences who did go to the Velvet needed to hear, and which he and his acolytes needed to play — unless those amendations to his music grew out of his genuine musical considerations.
There are many musicians who are much more mainstream than Fred and Chicago’s AACM tend to be, pitching their music just where they’d like it to be, where they themselves are, down the middle. Like it or not, one must accept that Chicago has produced a couple of generations of musicians who stand as rugged individualists, willing to accept the hardships of not making mainstream $ because they are determined to play exactly what they hear as satisfying to themselves. Very few of them believe they should be paid more, to be fair. Most of them accept their tenuous financial states as a result of their artistic convictions, and just hope they can afford to keep operating on the margins, without expectation of middle-class security or longterm financial gain.
As usual, Howard, we agree much more than we disagree. In fact, when Ms. Peyroux played the fest, what you suggest (a jazz set) was what the Fest committee was expecting (Though the attendees seemed to like it nonetheless).
Please allow me to sure that it is clear that I am not critizing the Fest or its programming.
The JIC and the festival committee, in particular, have done an excellent job programming a diverse festival of very high quality for a very long time now. This is not meant as an indictment of their work in any way. They deserve praise. High praise. As does Fred. No question there. No argument from me. I admire them all. That’s not what I am talking about. I bring them up only to illustrate that different strategies are employed to achieve different goals.
The explicit goals for the Chicago Jazz Fest have never been marketing goals but rather a programming goal to achieve artisitic excellence while presenting a range of jazz styles and forms. Against these programming goals, they have been terrifically successful and independent research show attendees loved it. They succeeded with flying colors. But these are more like programming criteria and not really marketing goals.
My point is simply that if the challenge for a festival is, as you put it, “to enlarge and improve the audience experience and sell more tickets”, the strategies and tactics (e.g. including everything from programming to parking) should be aligned to that challenge. To have marketing success, you should select tactics and strategies that will most readily achieve that goal without trading off the values that the producing organization stands for–and that includes who and what you put on a stage.
If you consider the challenge of “presenting excellent jazz in all its forms” as compared to the challenge of “introducing jazz to new audiences”, I think the distinction is clear. The steps that one would take to address those two distinct types of challenges would likely be very different.
I doubt the goal of the Chicago Jazz Festival should be principally to introduce jazz to new audiences. That can be done — perhaps in smaller, more concentrated presentation forums that are connected to the fest but not central to it. Let the Madeleine Peyroux fans pay $25 to attend a Jazz Fest-related performance off-site. At that event, promote to those audience members the pleasures of attending the jazz fest in the park. In the park, present real jazz — it doesn’t have to be the most experimental, but neither the most plebian or compromised music. Put on great stuff in the park. Put on specialized audience artists in side-shows. Have plenty of those side-shows, produced by private entrepreneurs. Celebrate genuine jazz at a genuine jazz festival. Don’t water it down to attract a relative handful of interest-specific audience members who come just to hear their favorite artist, and then leave unexposed to the glories of real jazz.
There are SO MANY ways to engage the true jazz fan in Chicago — I’ve suggested an anthology set of the best South Side singers, each doing their signature song. Importing artists who are irrelevant to anything but the commercial market does the jazz fest a disservice. Important artists who can nurture through example the local jazz scene by presenting models of excellence is much more productive. For the most part, the committee that programs the Chicago Jazz Fest tries to do that. Congrats on their success. Thanks Jim — we are, I think, aiming at the same goal.
Hi Jim,
Both you and HM are right on point re: a number of very important but often overlooked issues in the discussion of jazz, market research, and audience-building. I recall reading about an effort by the Phil Orch whereupon under-30 prospects were offered free tickets to a symphony performance, and to the marketing dept’s dismay, they still had trouble getting a robust response. Why? IIRC it boiled down to the non-price risks, such as ‘fear of having a bad experience’. You raised this exact point in your post. I was wondering if you might be able to help me find the research you were referring to when you raised this point (fear of bad experience outweighs promise of good exp). I would love to have a solid example to back up this notion, which I firmly believe in nonetheless. You are so right, it is among the most relevant–yet undiscussed–types of research extant.
Thanks,
Mike Pigott
mikepigott@aol.com
I like what Jim says If you are not creating new fans how can you build audience
that what we trying to do in Lincoln Nebraska ,need all the help I can get my problem is funding since I have
Smooth jazz internet radio station .
Thanks for the thoughtful article Howard. As noted, the cross section represented in the study is fairly limited but the information gleaned can be useful as a platform to build new kinds of partnerships and collaborations. In Chicago–a market that was not included in the study–the jazz scene has enjoyed significant support from a variety of City agencies and private philanthropies, as well as a generally cooperative, collaborative environment. We’ve been able to experiment with a mix of ticketed and free events, -public and private spaces that range from the city’s jazz clubs to public parks.
The particular group I am associated with is the Jazz Institute of Chicago, a 43 year old organization that began at a time when there was tremendous competition with rock and roll–jazz clubs were closing, it was too expensive to tour swing bands and there was this crazy new fusion jazz that was fragmenting the audience. As you point out, what’s happening now has many resonances with the past . If we look to the music as a model it will tell us that in order to survive it needs to continually evolve–which it has for over 100 years. Those of us who can’t move forward will be left serving smaller and smaller audiences.
If the focus of the survey is on selling tickets it really narrows down the possibilities of developing the audience. What we need to do is rethink how people want to experience the music, and where and with whom. The music will give them the reason why–all we have to do is be smart about how we deliver it.
I agree, Lauren — adaptability is the key, being aware of the audience, the artists and the possibilities. I also insist that MEDIA has an important role to play in building the jazz audience (which builds the jazz ticket-buying audience) — but media was very much overlooked by the segmentation study and also at the jazz leaders’ convening. Last night at The Stone hearing Fieldwork (Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey) I was speaking with Pi Records’ principal Yulun Wang, who believes the venues and practices for jazz performances should be re-conceived. But I think The Jazz Institute of Chicago has done exemplary work in creating new ways to present jazz and invite audiences in (the Club Tour is an innovation that could be profitably imitated, use of the Cultural Center has been really good). I’m looking forward to coming to the 2011 Chicago Jazz Festival!
All good points in a large market like Chicago which everyone mentions. I am no longer in such a market since I left NYC 10 years ago.
I thought this would be relevant to this topic:
Renewing and replacing the audience that grew up on this music when the music was developing is an interesting and tough order. The American culture has changed dramatically since the ’40′s-60′s and the music is no longer in it’s development stage. Jazz has become a mature idiom and is kept alive with players playing inside the wide variety of styles invented during the rich development period in the middle of the last century. The culture has changed with music education being the first thing to go in most schools under this neo conservative takeover of our politics. In addition the alternative things in competition with music for entertainment attention and dollars has exploded. When Bird was blowing it was radio and TV was just getting started. Going to a club for entertainment still had a strong foothold. But that changed radically in the 60-70′s and it isn’t coming back.
I teach at the Vermont Jazz Center, vtjazz.org, and love turning people on to jazz. I was able to play jazz with great players such as Howard McGhee, Nick Brignola, Tal Farlow, Mose Allison, Herb Ellis to name a few. I had the bass chair with Houston Person and Etta Jones from ’96 to 2001. I have experiences that young players will not get as I was part of the apprentice program in jazz: the leader calls a tune you don’t know and says, “You’ll hear it.” On the job training. Also young player are not playing with those of us left from the last period of jazz development. They tend to hire guys their own age, further isolating themselves from the apprentice system and the direct connection to the traditions.
There is a scene that has been alive in Northampton Mass for the last year and a half and to my knowledge unique. Tuesday nights at the Green Street Cafe there is a jam session with a house trio consisting of Paul Arslanian (p), Jon Fisher (d), and me on bass. We bring in a guest artist for the 1st set, like Ralph LaLama and Nicole Pasternak from NY or Giacamo Gates and Gary Smulyan. Then we open it up to a jam session, the original apprentice system. We are community organizers.
What this has created is a steady core audience of players and supporters that show up every Tuesday they can. This is a community that grows when some of the audience hires us for a party and the guest dig it. We invite them to start coming Tuesdays.
Here is a quote from Paul when I sent a link to the article to him:
“We all know that the jazz experience is an intimate and very personal one and the closer we, as presenters and players, can bring our audiences to knowing our thought process and our reasons for playing this stuff, the more they dig it and understand it and support it. We and they are there to be a part of a community that is exploring, communicating, stretching, rhythmically, melodically and harmonically partying, and being ourselves, totally naked and on the edge (at least in that moment of music making).”
So it looks like we’re making fans one at a time.
George, the audience survey suggests you’re doing just the right thing — hosting a participatory event at an intimate venue, mixing young wannabes and emerging talents with older “jazz ominvore” professionals. I’d like to ask Lindalee Lawrence, an eyeJAZZ trainee, to check out your jam session and, I hope make a video about it.
Thanks for the information and keep up the jam.
Thanks for the acknowledgement. It’s a small club, low pay but it’s every week and now it’s a scene, like we used to have in Albany, NY in the 70′s. To have a video would be great. It would be nice to have the documentation as it will end one day. The owner does well with the food, which is great French cuisine, and he loves the scene. He also treats the musicians very well which goes a long way in the respect department.
Your welcome anytime. Every tuesday 7:30-10:30 @ Green Street Cafe http://www.greenstreetcafenorthampton.com/contact.php
Give me your email and Lindalee’s and I’ll put you both on the mailing list and forward the current fall lineup.
Use my email address you get through the blog to contact me for any details.
George