[Dixielandjazz] Wall Street Journal - "Can Jazz Be Saved?"

[David Richoux]

There was a recent public performance in New York by a new 12 piece  
ensemble called Asphalt Orchestra. Instrumentation is about the same  
as a New Orleans Brass Band. The members are young-ish and play in a  
lot of other New York area bands - with some effort put into costume  
and visual performance, rehearsal and arrangements of some rather  
complicated jazz/modern composition/world music pieces, they were able  
to play to a mixed audience with some success. Here are some articles  
about the band and the gig,
> http://www.playbillarts.com/features/article/8082.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/arts/music/07asphalt.html?_r=1

and a radio studio performance (NOT OKOM!!! - just warning you to not  
expect a classic Jass piece, but some of us might like it ;-)
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/08/05    scroll  
down a bit )

With this (and other )  "mainstream" coverage of bands that have  
developed out of the recent "Street Band" music culture I have been  
mentioning over the last few years, maybe this is one of the  
directions Jazz may be heading for the next few decades? Not the  
"cultured concert Head Music" but fun, funky, danceable, music  
produced by "average" musicians that is happening all over the  
world... not exactly jazz, but something like it?

Dave RIchoux


On Aug 8, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Stephen G Barbone wrote:

> Note especially the last paragraph. Where have you heard that  
> before? <grin>
>
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
> www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
>
>
> Can Jazz Be Saved?   - Wall Street Journal 8-8-09
> The audience for America’s great art form is withering away
> By TERRY TEACHOUT
>
> New York
>
> In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be “a  
> rare and valuable national treasure.” Nowadays the music of Louis  
> Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught  
> in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at  
> prestigious venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, which even  
> runs its own nightclub, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.
>
> Here’s the catch: Nobody’s listening.
>
> No, it’s not quite that bad—but it’s no longer possible for head-in- 
> the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is  
> economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than  
> bleak.
>
> The bad news came from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest  
> Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the fourth to be  
> conducted by the NEA (in participation with the U.S. Census Bureau)  
> since 1982. These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up  
> and take notice:
>
> • In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans  
> attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to  
> 7.8%.
>
> • Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older 
> —fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz  
> performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.
>
> • Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances  
> today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans  
> between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance  
> in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That’s a 30% drop in  
> attendance.
>
> • Even among college-educated adults, the audience for live jazz has  
> shrunk significantly, to 14.9% in 2008 from 19.4% in 1982.
>
> These numbers indicate that the audience for jazz in America is both  
> aging and shrinking at an alarming rate. What I find no less  
> revealing, though, is that the median age of the jazz audience is  
> now comparable to the ages for attendees of live performances of  
> classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs.  
> 43 in 1982), nonmusical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet  
> (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982). In 1982, by contrast, jazz fans were  
> much younger than their high-culture counterparts.
>
> What does this tell us? 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.
>
> Jazz has changed greatly since the ’30s, when Louis Armstrong, one  
> of the supreme musical geniuses of the 20th century, was also a pop  
> star, a gravel-voiced crooner who made movies with Bing Crosby and  
> Mae West and whose records sold by the truckload to fans who knew  
> nothing about jazz except that Satchmo played and sang it. As late  
> as the early ’50s, jazz was still for the most part a genuinely  
> popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary  
> people could dance if they felt like it. But by the ’60s, it had  
> evolved into a challenging concert music whose complexities repelled  
> many of the same youngsters who were falling hard for rock and soul.  
> Yes, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” sold very well for a jazz  
> album in 1965—but most kids preferred “California Girls” and “The  
> Tracks of My Tears,” and still do now that they have kids of their  
> own.
>
> Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to undo the transformation of jazz  
> into a sophisticated art music. But there’s no sense in pretending  
> that it didn’t happen, or that contemporary jazz is capable of  
> appealing to the same kind of mass audience that thrilled to the big  
> bands of the swing era. And it is precisely because jazz is now  
> widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its makers must start  
> to grapple with the same problems of presentation, marketing and  
> audience development as do symphony orchestras, drama companies and  
> art museums—a task that will be made all the more daunting by the  
> fact that jazz is made for the most part by individuals, not  
> established institutions with deep pockets.
>
> 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.
>
> —Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every  
> other Saturday and blogs about the arts atwww.terryteachout.com.  
> Write to him at tteachout at wsj.com.
>
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