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

[Don Gumpert]

For a goodly number of years, I have attended the New Orleans Jazz Festival 
and have enjoyed every minute.  I am, of course, speaking of the jazz fest 
held in downtown New Orleans, as opposed to whatever is being held at the 
fairgrounds.  I can't imagine going to the fairgrounds version of a festival 
when all I have to do is walk down Bourbon Street at any time of the day (or 
night) and listen to My Kind of Music!
Sandy Gumpert
Ft. Walton Beach, Florida

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephen G Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: <dongumpert at cox.net>
Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 9:44 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Jazz Takes a Back Seat at N.O. J & H.



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.
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