[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Takes a Back Seat at N.O. J & H.

[Stephen G Barbone]

I don't see this article  the DJML. It is the one that prompted  
Marek's response. If it appears, sorry for the duplication. Courtesy  
of Norman Vickers who posted it on  another list to which Marek and I  
belong.

Cheers,
SteveBarbone
www.mysp;ace.cpom/baarbonestreetjazzband

Jazz Takes a Back Seat at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

By Brian Ross:
Yes, I speak jazz heresy: Maybe it is time that the promoters of the  
annual April/May music festival in New Orleans fess up. Jazz may get  
top billing on the signage and the posters at the New Orleans Jazz &  
Heritage Festival, but it rides the back of the bus on the fairgrounds.

There's a reason for this too... (Shhhh...) Jazz doesn't make the  
festival much money.
The smallish jazz tent at "Jazz Fest" was relegated to a location  
directly behind the big ACURA main stage where the blow-back of the  
mega-speakers blaring alternative pop bands like Arcade Fire muddled  
the music of The Mingus Big Band and others.

Only a festival with the namesake Jazz was positioned for that kind of  
disrespect. Not Gospel. Not Blues. Not Cajun.

It is not the first year that it has been that way, either.

The bitter pill for Jazz fans like myself to swallow, particularly in  
the city that was the birthplace of the music. Jazz does not move  
millions of dollars in tickets and souvenirs. Alternative and pop do.

So the promoters roll with the money. Pop sensation Arcade Fire? Front  
and center. The Mingus Big Band? You heard it well if you were not  
sitting to the back of the tent, closer to the audio blow-back from  
the mountainous speakers surrounding the main stage just a few hundred  
feet away.

You can't entirely blame the promoters. Jazz has been on its way to  
endangered species status in the United States since the end of the  
BeBop Era in 1955, when it moved away from being a popular  
entertainment to an art form. As the art form ranged off into new  
vistas, from acid jazz to fusion to you-name-it, it began to fade in  
popularity but it grew in academic interest. Today, jazz music is very  
much a part of academia. The music is taught and performed in middle  
schools, high schools, colleges and universities nationwide.

Outside of schools, it is performed professionally in the United  
States for a dwindling audience of largely white, ex-Beatniks and  
aging-post-hippies who often have to band together and form music  
societies or promotional groups to bring it to their cities.

Originated by African-American performers, many young African- 
Americans have moved on to other more profitable musical forms, like  
Hip-Hop, Techno and Rap.

The music that rose out of African and Christian musical traditions in  
the bars, brothels and sidewalks of New Orleans is played around the  
world by musicians of great talent and passion. You are as likely  
today to see a clarinetist from France and a pianist from Japan at the  
Preservation Hall. At the Heritage Festival jazz bands sported a  
Chinese drummer and a Russian bassist.

Jazz possesses little super-star power in a pop-soaked America that  
hangs on every drooling syllable of a Justin Bieber or the latest  
costume outrage of a Lady Gaga. It has no mega bands packing 60,000  
screaming fans into a venues in the United States.

Before I'm flayed alive by boiling mad Jazz fans, yes friends, Wynton  
Marsalis and Christian McBride and Chick Corea are big names to all of  
us who love the music. We are the hockey fans of the music world,  
though. Outsiders know a few names, like they know the NHL's Wayne  
Gretzky or Sidney Crosby. Most pop fans know Jazz as Kenny G, not  
Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea.

A site listing the fifteen most influential jazz artists does not list  
one living artist.
Jazz, like classical music, has become more of an acquired taste. John  
Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk, to name  
a few, pushed the music out of its Big Band conformity, exploring the  
outer limits of music, time and space with their instruments.  
Artistically successful? Sure. Distancing from popularity, though, was  
a financial disaster. Pop music isn't big on dissonance. It isn't big  
on free. It delivers the tune that has been played a thousand times  
with minor variations. The driving drumming rock ballad. The soul  
singer soaring upward to that big crescendo. The rap riff ripped over  
some classic beat.

Modern Jazz deviates. It explores. It redefines. Sometimes it is  
linear. Sometimes it is not.

That doesn't resonate well in our Billions and Billions Served McMedia- 
Hyped music business.

We lack an Ahmet Ertegün, founder of Atlantic Records, or an Alfred  
Lion, founder of Blue Note. Men behind the jazz stars who made them  
epic, who promoted them and made them edgy, relevant, cool. Ertegun's  
last shot at it before his death, the debut of Norah Jones, was as  
close as jazz has come to being a major popular art form again.

Academia, the refuge of able jazz musicians great and small, preserves  
the music, but it also limits it. What's taught in school isn't cool.

Most of the great American music forms rise out of the poorest  
neighborhoods, from the porches and churches and taverns of humble  
beginnings. They are also about the taboo, setting new trends, and,  
let's face it: Pissing off your parents. Music is a generational  
battle cry, and a rebellion against the prior generation.

The jazz of the Roaring '20s was the music of prohibition. It was  
free. It was wild. It was sinful.

Rock was the music that was going to corrupt American youth.

Now it is Rap's turn.

Jazz needs a spark. It needs a new direction. Respect the history, but  
for it to thrive, it needs to becool again. It needs to be counter- 
culture. It needs to piss off more parents.
Perhaps one of today's stars, perhaps someone in a high school  
classroom, or playing on the streets of New Orleans, will be that  
person to give jazz back its cool. Maybe a new producer/imprimatur  
will arrive on the scene and reignite the genre.

If not, I fear that Jazz will continue its slide into longhaired  
academic irrelevance.

Particularly at a festival chartered to promote Jazz and other  
cultural heritage music of New Orleans, though, the organizers of the  
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival can go a long way towards  
making jazz music more prominent: A better location on the  
fairgrounds, and some of the top acts in the genre each weekend, might  
be a good start. Bring in more of the brass bands and small Dixieland  
bands working the streets of the French Quarter to play in the open  
areas of the fairgrounds.

The Festival's foundation is failing the music as much as the music  
may be failing their financial aims. If they want Jazz in the title,  
though, they need to do a whole lot more to respect and nourish it at  
the "Jazz Fest."

My shiny two.