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.

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photo from Jazz Foundation of America

Agnes Varis, a major progressive philanthropist funding the Jazz Foundation of America, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera while fighting for reduced health care costs through perscription of generic drugs and supporting a broad array of Democratic and women’s issues, died of cancer July 29 at age 81. She was officially honored as “Saint of the Century” by Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana Mitch Landrieu at the JFA’s annual benefit concert “A Great Night in Harlem,” at the Apollo Theater in 2009.

According to the New York Times, Dr. Varis was pre-deceased by her husband Karl Leichtman in 2009, and leaves no immediate survivors. But hundreds of jazz players, newcomers and devoted audiences have been touched by Dr. Varis’ generosity. Her donations to the Jazz Foundation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina set up a Jazz in the Schools program employing elder musicians; it’s currently said to involve 350 of them in 17 states, including 120 in New York City playing free concerts in schools, nursing homes and hospitals. Her annual gifts to JALC (in 2010, $3 million) have led its fundraising efforts annually, paying for infrared lighting systems, a new stage and recording facilities. She underwrote tickets to the Met for senior citizens among other costs, reportedly to the aria of $21 million.

At birth, Agnes Koulouvaris was the youngest of eight children of Greek/Jewish immigrants; she attended Brooklyn college, studying chemistry and English. By profession, she turned into a hands-on businesswoman whose company Agvar Chemicals and Aegis Pharmaceuticals has, according to Bloomberg News, annual revenues between $50 million and $100 million. By conviction, she was a political activist, a “role model [and] mentor,” according to the Jazz Journalists Association’s citation of her as a recipient of its 2009 “A Team” Award, who “worked to break down barriers for women in business and in politics, having, for instance underwritten a women’s campaign school run by the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee to train and encourage women running for elected office in New York State.” She gave support to services for battered women in Bergen county, and helped provide medicines to service workers who lost jobs as a result of the attacks of 9/11.

Among Dr. Varis’s many positions, she was Trustee of Tufts University and member of the Board of Overseers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Managing Director of the Metropolitan Opera, a member of the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jazz Foundation, and a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Her greatest efforts went towards reforms of prescription drug policies, which put her in direct philosophical conflict as well as business rivalry with Merck, Pfizer and other giants of the pharmaceutical industry behind the powerful lobbyist group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

Among organizations she founded, one of the earliest was “New Jersey Business Executives against the Vietnam War.” Dr. Agnes Varis told Manuela Hoelterhoff of Bloomberg News she was motivated to “doing good.” Saint or not, the woman was clearly on the side of the angels.
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Pianist Herbie Hancock has been appointed a “goodwill ambassador” by UNESCO. The 71-year-old multiple Grammy winner, Chicago-born child prodigy, Miles Davis’ keyboards man ushering open-form improvisation, electronic instruments and studio procedures into the past half-century of jazz-based music and talent scout with global interests joins an international coterie that currently includes Nelson Mandela, Pierre Cardin, Claudia Cardinale, Forest Whitaker, Jean Michel Jarre and royal personages from Belgium, Jordan, Morocco and Thailand.

A composer, interpreter, performer, soloist and bandleader of serious, sophisticated and also commercial crossover success — one of the rare musicians who is both artist and entertainer, leader and accompanist, classicist and innovator — Hancock will “use music to cross cultural boundaries and promote literacy and creativity among youth around the world.” He calls for April 30 to be recognized as “international jazz day” and will lobby for UNESCO to cite jazz on its World Heritage List of “936 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.”

Hancock’s evergreen-hip, vamp- and ostinato-based tunes such as “Watermelon Man” (written in 1962, re-arranged in ’73), “Chameleon” (issued in ’73, basis of garage jam sessions ever since), “Rockit” (the ’83 injection of hip-hop turntablism to the future-funk mix, marketed with an eye-grabbing video) and “Cantaloupe Island” (from the 1963 recording, Hancock and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard sampled to make US3’s “Cantaloop” a dancefloor smash in ’93) have intrigued musicians as well as listeners over four decades. So has his virtuosic, spontaneous pianism, which runs the gamut: cool-to-the-point-of-minimal, inquisitive, expansive and engaged, rhythmically energized or rhapsodic, post-modernly self-conscious or really, truly, freely free (hear him with Miles at the Plugged Nickel, 1966.

Hancock’s 1998 album Gershwin’s World is an excellent example of his range. It includes his performance of Gershwin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G, second movement and Prelude in C# Minor with soprano Katheleen Battle, alongside renditions of “St. Louis Blues” with Steve Wonder playing harmonica, “Embraceable You” sung by Joni Mitchell, a piano duet with Chick Corea and a couple of relatively straightahead tracks for a combo with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, his collaborator of nearly 50 years. But even that recording skips several of Hancock’s interests.

Besides popularizing the Fender Rhodes electric piano on Davis productions Filles de Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way, Hancock introduced synthesizers (at first programmed and played by Dr. Patrick Gleeson) to jazz with his Mwandishi band. He’s worked with Latin percussionists (“Watermelon Man” was originally a hit for Mongo Santamaria). He’s had a longtime interest in Brazilian music, recording with Milton Nascimento, on video with Gal Costa and Antonio Carlos Jobim. River: The Joni Letters was only the second jazz recording ever to win the Grammy nod for Album of the Year, in 2008.

My desert island choice of Hancock’s music is Maiden Voyage, released in 1965. Discovering it when I was 16 led me to his just-previous Emperyan Isles and many subsequent recordings by Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (his colleagues in Miles’ great quintet), Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Sam Rivers, Dexter Gordon, and more. In this clip he wades in gradually, is bouyed by Carter (bass) and Willians (drums), then welcomes Hubbard and saxophonist Joe Henderson.

Hancock has been in the front line of modern jazz piano evolution, following from Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor to Andrew Hill, Joe Zawinul, McCoy Tyner, Paul Bley, Mal Waldron, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett. On Crossings and Sextant he entered synthesized spheres only Sun Ra had dared before. He’s said his early adoption of multiple keyboards and processors was informed by his college studies of electrical engineering.

Hancock’s understanding of jazz-funk-fusion and openness to producer Bill Laswell’s hip-hop beats, and most recently his song collections with casts of famed singers, have kept him in the public eye. So have his mid ’80s PBS/BBC video show Rockschool, his movie work (Blow Up, Death Wish, Round Midnight), his chairmanship of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, his sponsorship of emerging talent like guitarist Lionel Loueke and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Wynton Marsalis first recorded for Columbia Records in Herbie Hancock’s band.

I dig Hancock’s lesser-known Village Life, a duet with Senegalese griot Foday Musa Suso, and recommend Gershwin’s World and River. His current album, The Imagine Project, is ultra multikulti, with collaborators Dave Matthews, Céu, Pink, John Legend, The Chieftains, Los Lobos, Tinariwen, K’Naan, Anoushka Shankar. It appeals to a different crowd than that to which the pianist played on his just concluded European tour featuring tenor saxist Shorter and bassist Marcus Miller, Davis’s late-career electric bassist and producer.

In September Hancock has several California dates with his his piano-guitar-bass-drums quartet, and in November he’s scheduled three Pacific Northwest performances with orchestras of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. He is also the current “creative chair for jazz” of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His activities as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador are not yet posted. Presumably he’ll keep doing what he’s been doing, even more selflessly and world-wide.

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