The Death of Jazz

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,DDT
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:59 PM

"Isn't jazz a bit like folk?"

Very superficially. Yes, neither is mainstream but here is what concerns me:

Jazz has reached the status of "art form" while folk has not. One reason blacks have dropped away from blues so drastically is that it is not an art form. They have clung to jazz because it is. Because of this, shows as the Grammys can't ignore jazz. To do so, would be perceived as a slap in the face. They must acknowledge it. But the Grammys are an awards program based really on sales and not artistic merit. They like to think they are but they aren't. So they have found a way to use jazz--to block those popular artists they feel it would be beneath their dignity to award and to achieve this by creating bullshit categories to give to the "jazz" artist.

I'd much rather that jazz be ignored by the Grammys because what they inevitably issue awards for is not jazz for the very reason an earlier poster stated: The pop music listener perceives it as tuneless rambling. Jazz is what it is and turning pop into jazz and then awarding it doesn't make it jazz and doesn't further the cause of jazz.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: fat B****rd
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:47 PM

I'm listening to UK BBC radio 4's programme abut the saxophone even as I type. Soweto Kinch and Courtney Pine compering. They seem quite happy about jazz in general, mind you I believe the progamme is a repeat.
As a jazz person and not a folk person I agree totally with Spleen Cringe.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,Spleen Cringe
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:40 PM

And if there was a like button on Mudcat, I would "like" Roderick Warner's post above...

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,Spleen Cringe
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:38 PM

Isn't jazz a bit like folk? A fiercely contested non-mainstream music that doesn't generally sell in huge quantities (but when it does it's generally stuff from the pop/crossover end of the spectrum)?

And there's plenty of great jazz around: Try some William Parker Hamiet Bluiett Charles Gayle recorded at a concert a couple of months back. Unlikely to win a Grammy, I admit...

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:37 PM

Apart from Django they stopped recording good Jazz in 1931

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,roderick warner
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:31 PM

I don't think anybody told saxophonist Charles Gayle on his amazing visits to the uk over the last few years that jazz is dead... Or the Arkestra... or a whole bunch of people I've seen down the Cafe Oto in Dalston over the years either with a young and vibrant audience listening to challenging musics. Off there in April to see one of the best jazz musicians this country has ever produced - the mighty Keith Tippett, pianist supreme.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: Ron Davies
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:26 PM

So, you've reverted to your curmudgeon phase.   Not surprising. It's clearly a more comfortable fit than your avant-garde pose.   Interestingly enough, I agree with you in part--pop music these days is in fact both mostly vapid and responsible for financing better music.

But you can rage against the injustice of it all as much as you want.   Thread appears to have been better titled:   "Rejection By Public and Grammy People Of Instrumental Jazz I Think Is Good".    However I'll have to say I don't ever buy instrumental jazz (haven't bought any since the Tijuana Brass , which was both eons ago, and also no doubt does not fit your definition of jazz)--and I'm a big consumer of non-pop music.   In fact it's vocal jazz that I love- (and I'm with the Grammy people on that) --and that has been in decline since the bebop era. The best jazz was long ago. As I've said before, as primarily a singer, I want a recognizable melody.   And it's possible that I am not alone in this.

There's even the possibility that the use of synthesizers, drum machines etc, in current instrumental jazz has turned some people off. Wouldn't that be something. But you'd know better than I would as to if these abominations are in fact used in instrumental jazz these days.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,DDT
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:25 PM

So Spalding is not a jazz artist as far as you are concerned? That's really the essence of my argument.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:08 PM

Humans do music because they enjoy it. The musicians enjoy playing and the audience enjoys listening. Unfortunately, jazz musicians moved the slider bar way far to the the 'musicians enjoy' end of the scale and too far from the 'audience enjoy' scale. The result is much tuneless rambling.

I explained to a friend once that jazz musicians have a good time fiddling with their instruments but that doesn't mean the result is intersting for the audience. He said, "You have liberated me from jazz!"

There are reasons why jazz is a not-for-profit activity.

Subject: RE: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,DDT
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 01:27 PM

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.

Subject: The Death of Jazz
From: GUEST,DDT
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 01:24 PM

According to Neilsen SoundScan (the official source of record sales in the music industry since 1991), the top ten best-selling albums for each of the first 12 years of the 21st century do not contain a single jazz album. Even worse, as a result, Americans seem to be increasingly ignorant of what jazz is. The top-selling album of 2011 and 2012 was Adele's "21." She has far outsold every other artist. I am amazed at how many times I have heard someone call her a "jazz artist." Do these people have ANY IDEA of what jazz is?? If not (and they obviously don't), why do they say that?? I have listened to several Adele songs on Youtube and not one of them is even jazz-flavored pop much less jazz. I suppose she's a decent enough artist, it's not anything I would care to buy, but she is simply NOT jazz or even remotely jazz.

Interesting also that in 2011, bassist Esperanza Spalding became the first "jazz" artist to win the Best New Artist award at the Grammy's in spite of the fact that Spalding had not released a jazz album in three years. She was given the award so that the Grammy committee could have an excuse not to award Justin Bieber whom Spalding had beaten out which enraged many of Bieber's fans. Spalding had not sold enough albums to rate in the top ten for any year while Bieber had done so from 2010 to 2012 so perhaps Bieber's fanbase had a right to be angry.

The album that the Grammy people seemed to be recognizing Spalding for was "Chamber Music Society" released the previous year. It was also rated as the number one jazz album but is not jazz but more of jazz-flavored pop. Spalding repeated the feat in 2012 with "Radio Music Society." Again, this album is not jazz. Ironically, the last jazz album Spalding released, "Esperanza" (2008), never got higher than #3. Her debut album, "Junjo" (2006), also jazz, sold so few copies that it was never rated. The first two releases, however, featured some impressive jazz chops imaginatively displayed. Spalding demonstrated that she was a formidable jazz artist who might well "take it to the next level." However, her next two releases saw her basswork take a backseat to her vocalizing.

Spalding is used by the Grammy people as a way to block other artists that it clearly considers more important (because they sell more records) if they nevertheless view said artists as being musically "vapid", shall we say. In this way, jazz is done a grave disservice. Indeed, Spalding has continued to make her name as a jazz artist in spite of not releasing a jazz recording in five years at the time of this writing (2013). For instance, Spalding won Jazz Artist of the year in 2011 at the Boston Music Awards and took Best Jazz Vocal Album at the Grammys in 2013. The last award is telling for she did not win for her bass-playing but for her vocals. We are free to assume that had she released an instrumental album, she may not have received any recognition at all since this is true of all the other jazz instrumentalists. Dave Holland and Eddie Gomez are two of the most awesome bassists in the world but both do instrumental jazz. So how many Grammys has either man won in the many years both have been recording? Combined together, the answer is none. Spalding also won another award at the 2013 Grammys that had nothing do with jazz: Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists—a category as meaningless as it is confusing—for the song "City of Roses."