Jazz blog

This is a blog post I'm writing for WIUX. It's a first draft, so feel free to criticize.

Awhile back, I was perusing the New York Times when I happened upon an article that caught my eye: a National Endowment for the Arts analysis of the average age of the jazz concertgoer. According to an article citing the same study on jazz.com, the aforementioned age has risen from 29 to 46 in the time period 1986-2009¹. Jazz music itself, according to the article, is in a state of crisis. I do not repudiate this point, but rather I come to offer a possible etiology for this virus that is ossifying this living, breathing American art form. My explanation is thus: jazz music as a whole is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the American cultural landscape. This change in our cultural attitude, it should be noted, is not a function of the waning importance of jazz in our national identity. Jazz remains as vital as it ever was in chronicling the musical heritage of America. Rather, this change is due to a steady shift in the popular perception of jazz music, one that has been taking place since the introduction of free jazz and modal jazz by artists like Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, respectively. I am referring to the perception of jazz as essentially an elitist art form, one that has no room for the poor or underprivileged, the marginalized rebels or yearning dreamers. Jazz, according to the average consumer of pop culture in the US, is an art form that is best enjoyed in an expensive music conservatory or hip coffee shop. I hereby call shenanigans on this wholly unsubstantial, slighted perception of jazz music. One needs only a cursory overview of the history of jazz to understand why this belief is deeply flawed. A shallow understanding of the basic nature of jazz is had by most people in the United States. It is general knowledge that jazz originated somehow from the slave songs sung by Africans exported to the US. This basic fact does not bring into consideration what happened to jazz after it got here. After the slaves were freed, jazz was adopted by the new lower class African-Americans as a unique facet of their nascent cultural identity. To these early adopters, jazz was not simply a dead academic exercise. It was a modus Vivendi that in many cases was literally the only thing keeping their roofs overhead and plates full. A common occurrence in turn-of-the-century New Orleans was the rent party, in which a group of cohabited musicians would invited everyone they knew to their often squalid and dilapidated apartment, in an often vain attempt to raise rent money. College students especially should be thankful for this idea, for it birthed the concept of the house party to which we all owe so much. The exciting and raucous nature of jazz did not end in the Big Easy, however. As jazz disseminated throughout the US, its practitioners exported their love of a good party to wherever they went. These men and women smoked and drank in excess, partied too hard, and laughed too loudly for mainstream America to be entirely comfortable with their presence, which led to harsh segregation imposed on venues which jazz musicians frequented. This in turn led to a strong backlash against segregation by the jazz community, perhaps most famously skewered in Charles Mingus’ song, “Fables of Faubus”, in which he derides the segregationist governor of Arkansas as a fascist and a Nazi. Oscar Peterson penned the civil rights anthem “Hymn to Freedom”. Max Roach released a spoken word album entitled “Freedom Now- We Insist!” which many consider the first hip-hop music ever recorded. The point of this long, meandering history lesson is to illustrate the vibrant nature of jazz music and the culture that surrounded it. I could name more examples still. Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow traffics such copious quantities of marijuana that its street name in New York and surrounds becomes “mezz”. Charlie Parker exhausts himself so thoroughly in his 35 years of life that the coroner performing the autopsy estimated the age of the heroin- and alcoholism-addled corpse to be closer to 60. In doing so, he becomes an icon of the nascent hipster movement, inspiring a generation of youth to wrest their lives from the forces which held control and live in their moment. The practitioners of jazz understood their music, felt it, and dedicated their lives to it in a way which few people before or since accomplished in any profession, be it musical or otherwise. I posit that jazz, far from being a decrepit intellectual posture, is actually the very music which accommodates the poor, the underprivileged, the dreamers and rebels of yesterday and today. It was and is the people’s music, a chronicle of the marginalized members of American society in the last 120 odd years. I believe that if more of the average consumers of pop culture in the US knew the story which I am telling, the true story of jazz, its tendency towards irrelevance in the national consciousness would reverse and it would regain some of its lost stature, not to mention a new generation of listeners eager to consume and weave their own story among the still-growing tapestry of the quintessential American art form.