Archives for August 2009

When The National Endowment for the Arts study on Public Participation in the Arts came out a few weeks ago, the survey’s bad news about the size of the jazz audience caused ripples of concern. It showed that over a six-year period, the number of Americans attending jazz events dropped to a low of 7.8%. In a population of 301 million, that translates to attendance of 2,347,800 each year at jazz clubs, concerts and festivals. As if that weren’t discouraging enough to those worried about the state of jazz, the audience for live jazz is growing older. According to the study, in 1982 the median age of listeners at live performances was 29. In 2008, it was 46.
Over the weekend, Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Journal column about the NEA study amplified those ripples of concern into waves as his piece was picked up by web sites and blogs. What are the implications of the numbers above and of the study’s other statistics of decline? Teachout, also an artsjournal.com blogger, wrote:

I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music–and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn.

Terry ended his column with this:

No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. If you’re marketing Schubert and Stravinsky to those listeners, you have no choice but to start from scratch and make the case for the beauty of their music to otherwise intelligent people who simply don’t take it for granted. By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners–not next month, not next week, but right now.

Fellow artsjournal.com blogger Howard Mandel, responding to Teachout, charges him with “forecasting the death of jazz.” In his column, Teachout does not do that. But, having set up the straw man, Mandel knocks it down with a series of illustrations that jazz is flourishing, all encouraging. You can read them in his new posting at Jazz Beyond Jazz.
“How to pitch it” is Teachout’s key phrase in his conclusion. Let’s take that to mean improvements in presentation, audience education and marketing. If jazz musicians find ways to reach larger audiences without watering down their art, it will be good for them and the future of the music. Calculated attempts to increase audience by forcing hybridization of the music itself have neither elevated its quality nor achieved permanent increases in attendance figures and record sales for uncompromised music. Such amalgams as disco jazz, soft jazz, smooth jazz and other varieties of near-jazz have done wonders for Kenny G and John Tesh, but little for players of undiluted jazz.
In a barroom discussion of such compromises, the guitarist Jim Hall once said, “Where do I go to sell out?” That was decades ago. You’ll notice that he hasn’t sold out. It may be that the NEA study illuminates what serious artists have always known even as they dreamt of popular acceptance, fame and wealth. The pianist John Lewis articulated it, and his quote has been popping up in the wake of the study: “The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.”
In the introduction to Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, I reflected on the matter of the jazz audience. Here’s an excerpt:

For a few years in the 1940s and 1940s, when the big band phenomenon resulted in a congruence of jazz and popular music, jazz records sometimes became best sellers. That happened not because the music was jazz, but because it was popular despite its being jazz. The high artistic quality of a hit like Erskine Hawkins’s “Tuxedo Junction” or Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee” was coincidental. In succeeding decades when an anomaly like Stan Getz’s “Desifinado” or Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” made the top forty, there was a revival of the old hope, born during a few unreproduceable years of the swing era, that jazz could again be a part of mass culture.
It is understandably painful to jazz musicians to witness the enormous popularity of inferior music based on jazz, and to see many of its practitioners become wealthy. A talented musician working for union scale might feel despair to read in one day’s newspaper that Bruce Springsteen, the rock star, earned an estimated $56 million in 1986-87, and in the next day’s edition find Springsteen quoted, “Chuck (Berry) played in a lot of strange keys, like B-flat and E-flat,” these “strange keys” actually being two of the least complicated. Like so much in life, commercial dominance by the slightly talented and musically ignorant is not fair. It may be time, however, as the brilliant alto saxophonist Phil Woods has suggested, for jazz players and listeners to accept the fact their music is art music, that commerce is commerce, and that the more sophisticated and artistically complete jazz becomes, the less likely it is to be a wide commercial success.
Because of its enormous strength, vitality and creative energy, jazz has from its beginnings influenced trendy popular offshoots. Fusion, crossover and the so-called New Age or earth music of the 1980s are only the latest manifestations of a tradition that goes back at least as far as the soupy sweet bands and chirpy pop songs of the l920s. Indeed, the popular music of the past sixty years in virtually all of it forms, especially including rock, would not have existed had there been no jazz. This could fairly be called a mixed blessing.
Still, despite the occasional brief popular acclaim of a jazz artist, the mother lode of American music remains untapped by most Americans.

Like Terry Teachout, I don’t know how to interest young people in jazz. I tend to think, based on observation and anecdotal information, that rather more of them listen to jazz than the NEA study suggests. Study results often lag behind current realities. I hope that’s the case here. I am sure of one thing; the de-emphasis and, in many cases, elimination, of arts education in public schools has done enormous damage to audience-building for music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. There are many more contributing factors, including the spread of instant communication with the result that young people are conditioned to instant gratification rather than slow, deep appreciation. That is a worldwide cultural and societal problem. I don’t know how to solve it, either.
Go here to read a summary of the NEA study.

The Boston Globe‘s Steve Greenlee reports from the resuscitated Newport Jazz Festival that he found the weekend’s best music in the festival’s outlying precincts.

As the Alps tower over Swiss villages, stacks of compact discs tower over me. Sampling, auditioning, listening at length when something grabs my ear, I make my way through the CD Alps that surround me. If I live to be 115, which is my plan, there is no possibility of my fully hearing more than a smattering of these discs. Some of the arrivals in the never-ending stream of albums are from veterans, young and old, recording for prominent companies. Many more are by musicians or singers who produce, distribute and market their own wares. They hope that in the new economic reality of the record business their CD calling cards will land gigs, sales, reviews or notice from established labels. First in this brief survey of recent listening is one that could do all of that.

Lena Seikaly, Written In The Stars (Lena Seikaly). Ms. Seikaly sings with a rich mezzo-soprano voice, using intonation, timbre and control that reflect her classical training. Her phrasing, feeling and improvisatory leanings come from an understanding of jazz values. She makes the unconventional, even daring, decision to open her debut album by scatting her way into “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” Musicianship and her sense of proportion make the track, and the CD, a success. Ms. Seikaly may scat too much for some tastes, but she does it with a musician’s grasp of harmony, not merely straining to be hip.

The more intriguing aspects of her performances here are in the ways she uses phrasing and tonal shadings to interpret songs when she’s singing lyrics. There is an effective instance of that element of her work as she imparts a minor, almost modal, cast to her final chorus on “When I Fall in Love.” She brings slight but effective variations of the melody to her straightforward treatments of “The Very Thought of You” and “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love,” one of Charles Mingus’s most moving ballads. Ms. Seikaly and tenor saxophonist Bobby Muncy achieve a rich blend on the wordless “Gravitation” and on “Written in the Stars,” two of her four compositions here. Muncy solos well in a style influenced by John Coltrane. The Washington, DC, rhythm section is comprised of pianist Nathan Lincoln-Decusatis, bassist Tom Baldwin and drummer David McDonald. Leonardo Lucini subs on bass for one track. Ms. Seikaly is a singer with significant potential.

Bobby Broom, Plays For Monk (Origin). Broom is too young to have worked with Thelonious Monk. He has been Sonny Rollins’s guitarist for nearly thirty years. Rollins was a Monk sideman who absorbed the pianist’s compositional, harmonic and rhythmic ethos, and it is likely that some of Rollins’s Monk wisdom has rubbed off on Broom. When he was very young, Broom also worked with Art Blakey, Monk’s ideal drummer. However he obtained it, in this relaxed, accessible collection, he brings depth of understanding to interpretations of eight Monk compositions and two standards that Monk enjoyed playing. Broom is not a speed demon virtuoso of the guitar, but a thoughtful improviser who knows the uses of space in the lines he creates. With bassist Dennis Carroll and drummer Kobie Watkins, Broom finds the beauty, humor, subtlety and swing that Monk put into “Ruby, My Dear,” “Evidence,” “Work,” “Bemsha Swing” and, emphatically, the joy Monk always transmitted in his performances of the old pop song “Lulu’s Back in Town.” Broom gives a heartfelt treatment of Monk’s ballad “Reflections,” a composition of structural perfection. The guitarist graces the piece in a moving solo that Carroll follows with a statement of equal beauty. Broom closes with a Monk favorite, Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He plays it unaccompanied, out of tempo and with what may well be reverence for Kern as well as for Monk.

If you don’t get the reference implied in the CD’s cover photo, this picture will help. It’s one of Monk’s classic Riverside albums, Monk’s Music. Among its other virtues, it has Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane as sidemen.

Frank Glover, Politico (Owl). Glover plays clarinet in modern mainstream territory that shares a border with free jazz. In this reissue of a 2005 CD that had limited distribution, he performs with the energized rhythm section of pianist Steve Allee, bassist Jack Helsley and drummer Bryson Kern. His writing for a string ensemble on one piece and a 14-piece band on another has intimations of Gil Evans and Béla Bartok. Glover’s playing, rich and woody in the lower register, tends toward shrillness during virtuoso excursions into the upper regions of the horn. His improvisations have a nice balance between long phrases and whirlwind flurries with adventuresome interval leaps. In the final movement of his 3-part “Concierto Para Quarteto,” Glover and pianist Allee execute stunning unison passages that blend in and out of free sections so subtly that only the closest attention discloses what is written and what is improvised. Stimulating stuff.

Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, The Classic Prestige Sessions, 1951-1956 (Prestige). The 25 tracks in this two-CD set have been reissued to a faretheewell over the years in various configurations, and no doubt will continue to be for years to come. Like Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Dickens novels, the poetry of Yeats and Fred Astaire’s films, they should be available in perpetuity. The five years of recordings here cover some of Davis’s and Rollins’s best work from their relative conceptual innocence in the immediate post-bop period to the mid-fifties, when each had become a formidable musician on the verge of fame and enormous influence. The sidemen constitute a hall of fame of the era. They include John Lewis, Percy Heath, Roy Haynes, Walter Bishop Jr., Art Blakey, Jackie McLean, Horace Silver and Charlie Parker. Yes, Charlie Parker. For any serious jazz listener, familiarity with these recordings is necessary to an understanding of how jazz developed over the past sixty years. A valuable bonus is Ira Gitler’s liner note memoir about the days when he worked at Prestige as a jack of all trades and was intimately involved with most of the musicians who produced this essential music

Marc Myers’ JazzWax wraps up a four-part interview with Denny Zeitlin, packed with good questions, and answers that give insights into an intriguing man. For decades, Zeitlin has maintained parallel careers as a jazz pianist and a practicing psychiatrist. Myers asked him how empathy plays a role in both pursuits.

When I’m doing my most effective work as a musician playing with other musicians, I try to lose that positional sense of self so I can enter their musical world and merge with what they’re doing. With a patient in my office, I do my most effective work when I’m able to enter their psychological life so deeply that I can really seem to feel what it is that he or she is feeling. Yet in both cases, there’s a part of me that is still available, that is able to pull back and observe the process that both of us are in.

To read all of the interview, go to JazzWax.com. For a piece I wrote about Zeitlin in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, go here.

Yesterday was Louis Armstrong’s 108th birthday, and I forgot to mention it. To make up for that oversight, Rifftides brings you Armstrong in 1958. Pops’s singing and playing partner is his pal of 30 years, Jack Teagarden. Louis was 57 years old and playing beautifully on every level — range, tone and ideas. At 2:41, listen to him turn a little lip bobble into pure gold. The cornetist who kicks things off is Ruby Braff.

One day I heard a pianist play `Honeysuckle Rose,’ … and I was hooked. I said, `What is that?’ He said, `jazz,’ which was a word I had never heard, and I asked him to spell it for me. My life was changed after that. – Joe Zawinul

I am an improviser, … I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. – Joe Zawinul

For a white Viennese boy to write a tune that’s that black is pretty remarkable. He just captured the essence of the African-American heritage, just the statement of melody and feeling of that song. Clearly, in some past life, Joe must’ve been black. – Herbie Hancock on “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Zawinul has been gone nearly two years. For a Rifftides reminiscence posted upon his passing, go here. It includes the story of why Cannonball Adderley’s first-choice take of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was nixed by the record company.

Put aside all of the old arguments about whether this is jazz, jazz-rock, fusion, world music, ethnic music, R&B, funk or something else. The arguments don’t matter anymore, if they ever did. This is truly, to borrow Ellington’s overused phrase, beyond category. There is no more stunning instance of what rhythm, harmony and harmonics can do for a repeated riff. Joe Zawinul wrote the song. This version of Weather Report is Zawinul at his electronic keyboard arsenal, Wayne Shorter playing two kinds of saxophone, Jaco Pastorius on bass and Peter Erskine on drums. The performance is from a concert in Germany in 1978. There are a couple of rough spots in the tape. Be glad the tape exists. YouTube says this clip has been viewed more than a million times.

Have a good weekend.