Archives for July 7, 2005

Reacting to Tuesday’s posting about the Wingspread conference on ways to grow the market share of jazz, Rifftides Reader Jan Brukman thinks it unlikely that jazz will exceed its three percent share of the market (an optimistic estimate) for music recordings, but he doesn’t think it will disappear.

As string quartets will never die, neither will jazz, and for the same reasons. They are classical forms; if you stray too much from the classical forms, however, you get experiments, which real people cannot hear. No amount of education can transcend that, as arrogant idiots like Charles Wuorinen never found out.

That is how many jazz people feel about Ornette Coleman, but Coleman has as enthusiastic a following as does Wuorinen among afficionados of music on the edges of modern classicism. Wuorinen is an American composer who uses the twelve-note system developed by Arnold Schoenberg and expanded by Milton Babbitt. He often writes electronic music. His best known pieces are Time’s Encomium, which brought him a Pulitzer prize, and Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. “Best known” does not mean familiar. I wonder how many people have heard a Wuorinen work. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant. The New York Times once wrote, “Charles Wuorinen has taken the decrees of 12-tone music and made them sing.” Dissenting somewhat, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote of Wuronen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a collaboration with Salman Rushdie:

Although Wuorinen has not renounced the twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen, surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and dances.

That paragraph, which has dissonant complexity of its own, is from a piece about the conductor James Levine. You can read the whole thing in Ross’s The Rest is Noise, a blog I cannot recommend highly enough. I am adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Gordon Sapsed reports on British radio and clubs not quite keeping jazz at arms’ length and not quite embracing it.

Here in the UK the London radio station Jazz FM recently changed its name to Smooth FM. Explaining the change the owners said, “it’s a sad fact of life that Jazz FM has never made a profit in 15 years of existence …..the station will continue its commitment to broadcast 45 hours of specialist jazz programming each week ….. but there is an enormous appetite for artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, George Benson, Michael Buble and Diana Krall who will fill the daytime schedule…… In-depth research shows that 40% of our listeners prefer the name ‘Smooth FM” and two thirds of non-listening Londoners are put off tuning in because of the name Jazz FM. 42% say they do not tune in because ‘they were not into jazz music.”
Meanwhile, here in the Southampton area, the Concorde Club (usually thought of locally as the Concorde Jazz Club) has undergone a multi-million pound refit but maintained a jazz policy by keeping jazz away from the money-earning Thursday Friday and Saturday nights. ‘Clubbing’, with dancing to D.J.s and tribute bands (clones of Elvis, The Stones,The Beatles and such) provides the funding to make jazz affordable on other nights. Jazz is just one part of the club’s overall image

Back in the USA, as one of those clone bands is probably singing, a veteran New York jazz pianist who has had trouble finding work told me about a gig she was offered. The conditions were that she play nothing but Sinatra hits and Italian songs…for no pay. She declined. At least, the club owner didn’t ask her to pay him. That has been happening in several cities, a rather radical redefinition of market share.

Have I mentioned lately that I wrote a book called Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond? You can buy it from the publisher and get free shipping. Please do.

Doug Ramsey explores every facet of Desmond’s public and private lives in this intimate, often hilarious and very thorough biography, a book that is very hard to put down. —Ken Dryden, allaboutJazz.com

See the entire review here.