The Grammys create these bogus categories to disguise the true title what is really a single category: "This Stuff Doesn't Sell Because It's Classified as Jazz But It's Still Pretty Good and Generally Better Than the Stuff That Does Sell." Jazz will always receive short shrift because its sales cannot come close to matching pop music sales. Spalding demonstrates that to remain relevant among the more popular artists, jazz must become a form of pop music—a more sophisticated form of pop but pop nonetheless. Nor is Spalding the best in this category. I place Steely Dan far above her.

To be sure, we cannot disparage pop music too severely without becoming hypocrites. Record labels generally use the sales of pop music to fund the more artistic recordings and projects. Regardless of how one feels about Justin Bieber or Katy Perry, their huge sales may have financed that boxed set of swing jazz bands of the 30s and 40s that you loved so much or that glorious Wagner opera recording that you gladly shelled out $50 for. That's the terrible irony of the music industry—pop music overshadows all the truly far better forms of music out there and yet without the enormous sales of pop, many of these far better forms of music would not even be available for public consumption. The problem is that the consumption is so shamefully scant.

People as Esperanza Spalding, as talented as she is, are trying to increase public consumption of jazz at the risk of the integrity of jazz itself.

The future of jazz is one that will be invaded by lightweights who grew up listening to Spalding and Adele (who, to my knowledge, has never had the audacity to call herself a jazz singer) and thinking this is jazz.