Is Jazz Dead? : Or Has It Moved to a New Address

321 Pages·2014·2.34 MB·English

by  Nicholson

Is
Jazz
Dead?
Is
Jazz
Dead?
(Or has it moved
to a new address)

STUART NICHOLSON
All citations are from the author’s personal interviews and/or email conversations, unless otherwise noted.

Published in 2005 by Published in Great Britain by
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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© 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-96708-2 (Hardcover) 0-415-
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International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-96708-2 (Hardcover) 978-
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Library of Congress Card Number 2005024395
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————————————————————————————
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
————————————————————————————
Nicholson, Stuart.
Is jazz dead? : (or has it moved to a new address) / by Stuart Nicholson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-96708-2 (hardback : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-415-97583-2 (pbk. :
alk. paper) 1. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3506.N5 2005
781.65′09′051—dc22 2005024395
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To Dr. Elizabeth Peterson
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
1 WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? THE JAZZ MAINSTREAM 1990 TO 2005
2 BETWEEN IMAGE AND ARTISTRY: THE WYNTON MARSALIS
PHENOMENON
3 PROPHETS LOOKING BACKWARD: JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER
4 DÉJÀ VU TIME ALL OVER AGAIN: JAZZ SINGERS AND NU-CROONERS
5 TEACHERS TEACHING TEACHERS: JAZZ EDUCATION
6 ALTERED REALITIES AND FRESH POSSIBILITIES: FUTURE JAZZ
7 OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND: JAZZ IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
8 CELEBRATING THE GLOCAL: THE NORDIC TONE IN JAZZ
9 A QUESTION OF SURVIVAL: MARKETPLACE OR SUBSIDY
REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION

The globalization of jazz is not just another engaging story, another sign of the music’s growing
acceptance. To my mind it is the main story, the overwhelming trend, the key evolutionary thread
taking us to the music’s future.
Ted Gioia, musician and author of The History of Jazz
and West Coast Jazz
Jazz in the new millennium is in a very different world than that which was so
lovingly re-created in the Ken Burns television retrospective Jazz. The reason is
simple: It is competing for the leisure dollar in a highly competitive marketplace.
Pop music, promoted with ruthless efficiency by the major corporations,
dominates the cultural spaces. Jazz’s voice is struggling to be heard.
So what’s new? Hasn’t jazz always jostled with consumer and popular culture
for the public’s attention throughout its history? Of course it has, but the early
millennium years presented a very different music marketplace than that of the
1980s or even the 1990s. A once chaotic music industry, with an ever-changing
array of music labels with names like Chess, Motown, Island, and Creation that
were once as anarchic as the music itself, has hardened into an immovable
oligarchy of EMI, Time-Warner, Universal, and Sony/BMG. As the number of
“majors” shrank to these four players, the number of international superstars was
also downsized, enabling the corporations to focus their efforts on promoting a
smaller number of people more effectively. Their success can be measured by
the ubiquity of these stars on the record charts and in the media, television,
radio, and the Internet, and is a triumph of the corporate marketing machine. The
increasing, homogenizing effect of the majors was reinforced by the
deregulation of the airwaves that allowed companies like Clear Channel
Communications, with more than 1,200 stations, to dominate the airwaves,
which critics claim contributes to the growing bland-ness of broadcast music.
So where does an art form like jazz figure in a corporate jungle like this?
Unprotected from market forces in the United States by public subsidy, it is
fighting an unequal battle for survival. Jazz is at the mercy of a market that
exerts its own disciplines, which can result in the music being shaped by
commercial imperatives rather than aesthetic logic. This can take many forms,
from an innocent request by a record producer to include a track by a jazz
vocalist on an otherwise instrumental album to a kind of natural selection where
promoters and club owners stick with a specific style they think the public wants
(which is often an idealized representation of jazz from the 1950s or 1960s) to
the exclusion of more experimental styles. If musicians don’t want to play by the
rules of supply and demand, then there is no shortage of those who will. A music
that was founded in spontaneity and self-expression is in danger of ending up at
the core of an ever more standardized world.
The inevitable homogenizing effects of the market take many forms, which I
have tried to explore in this book, and they have contributed to the rise of an
American mainstream that dominates current jazz practice. Those who do not
broadly adhere to its conventions risk claims they are not playing “jazz” at all —
the “real” jazz that swings and alludes to the blues. This overwhelming legacy of
the music exerts a powerful influence on how the music is shaped today, as
exemplified in the music of Wynton Marsalis and in the ethos of Jazz at Lincoln
Center. Meanwhile, a group of retro-styled singers have gained increasing
popularity by imitating the sounds and styles of the great pop vocalists of the
past. In the minds of many members of the public at large, and even some
musicians, jazz today has come to represent the past rather than the present. This
has been the cause of considerable controversy within the music. “The terms of
this debate pit the so-called neo-classicists, who insist on the priority of tradition
and draw their inspiration and identity from a sense of connectedness with the
historical jazz past, against both the continuous revolution of the avantgarde and
the commercial orientation of fusion,” wrote educator Scott DeVaux in his essay
“Constructing the Jazz Tradition.” I suggest this debate goes even further, to