Art

The Problem

Jazz has a central, existential problem. It's increasingly economically unsustainable. As record sales have disappeared entirely and live audiences have dwindled, jazz appears to have its very being threatened by the inability of the free market to sustain it. This places jazz musicians in the precarious spot of having to justify their own existence. Lady Gaga would never have to engage in this exercise. Millions of people demonstrate every day that they value what she produces, and she will never need to apply for a grant from anyone.

People, versed on the matter, have responded to this conundrum in different ways:

Some, albeit not jazz musicians, simply assert that jazz is dead. Jazz, in the traditional sense, they argue, ceased to be relevant when new instrumental acoustic jazz records failed to penetrate past the insular bubble of amateur and want-to-be jazz musicians. My cousin, often to my chagrin, belittles jazz as "that thing you do at night in the dark rooms with the instruments." But there is some truth in his derision.

Still, the opposite point could also be made - that there isn't a problem! One might argue that the market is growing, it's just moving. After all, there are plenty of gigs for working jazz musicians throughout Asia and in other emerging markets that didn't quite exist only a decade ago. Perhaps we are too narrowly focused on a small geographical region.

Others accept the idea that jazz has fallen out of the mainstream and embrace it, suggesting instead that jazz is a music to be housed at institutions of higher learning and supported by non-profit organizations. They argue that it's importance is academic and intellectual, and confers some public good, warranting the support of society's institutions.

Perhaps others yet could argue that our definition of jazz has simply grown too narrow despite our changing world. Elements of 'jazz' penetrate all forms of modern music, both directly and indirectly. Clinging to the idea that jazz must remain a relatively isolated, instrumental, and acoustic in a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected, digital, and whose dominant art is the 'mash-up' is naive. After all, there might not be any less jazz than there is rock and roll in many indie rock bands.

Perspectives

While there is clearly some truth to each of these perspectives, for those making instrumental jazz in the Western world, the problem of marginalization and dwindling audiences remains. In a recent interview with Seattle Weekly, Branford Marsalis addressed the issue of jazz's relevance. I don't agree with all of his conclusions but I think he paints a very clear picture of the underlying problem.

"I have a lot of normal friends. 'Cause it's important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what's good and what's not good, they don't consider the larger context of it."

This I know. Coming from broad academic background and not a music conservatory, I'm consistently shocked by how removed jazz has become from the people who might consume it. For supposedly intellectual music, modern jazz's progenitors are rarely versed on anything besides jazz, shockingly unaware of technology, the economy, other artistic movements, even other contemporary music.

In jazz we spend a lot of time talking about harmony. Harmonic music tends to be very insular. It tends to be [like] you're in the private club with a secret handshake.

Branford goes on to assert that one of the primary failures of modern jazz is the primacy of harmony over melody. This too I agree with to some extent. But I also think the problem is more general. The problem is not the failure to consider melody, but generally the failure to at all consider what things might be important to a non-musician. Much of modern jazz doesn't just lack melody; it also lacks dynamics, narrative, shape, and even harmony that appeals to the sensibilities and intuition of the audience.

Most jazz musicians ignore the question of who their prospective audience is, how to capture them, what content the music has to offer them. The exclusivity of jazz is thought mistakenly by it's practitioners to elevate it to lofty artistic territory. But this is a juvenile idea and a grave mistake.

However, this applies equally to melody and harmony. The game of "did you hear me quote a 70 year old standard no one under 50 listens to anymore?" is no more relevant than "did you hear me play the backdoor ii-V on the turnaround?"

And today's popular music isn't even particularly melodic. In contrast to the era that produced jazz, today's popular music is driven by texture, production and repetitive, nearly hypnotic beats. How many different Lady Gaga songs can you remember the melodies to? How many Beatles songs?

At the same time, of course Branford is right, and there exists an audience of laypeople moved by and receptive of music with strong melodic content. But there are also many other audiences out there.

Solutions

The answers, necessarily, are many and varied. But I think they all start in the same place - asking certain questions:

What are my artistic ambitions?
What are my ideas concerning the aesthetic?
Who might listen to what I have to offer?
What are they listening to now?
What else do they do in their lives?
How can I use my knowledge of the audience to engage them with a product that is perhaps different from what they currently listen to, but appeals to them somehow, be it via familiar repertoire and harmony, via showmanship, via lyric content?

For some reason these questions, even the premise of considering an audience strikes many in jazz, including a younger, and smarter, but also more naive version of myself, as distasteful, 'selling out' even.

But this has always been a part of what art is, and in fact is central to elevating it beyond craft. The difference between Jackson Pollack and some fool spray-painting macaroni in his basement is that Jackson Pollack found a way to make people pay attention and affect them.

The great works of classical music were often contextualized in the world outside of music. Operas, even those musically experimental, were usually set to well-known stories. Even symphonies often set to relatable themes. Jazz's delusion is that insular music is 'abstract'. IN that context, however, the word 'abstract' is butchered, meaning something more like 'unintelligible' or, more kindly, non-representational. The feat of abstraction in music is the metaphorical manifestation in sound of nonmusical ideas.

[Follow-up pending - Exemplars- Artists who have addressed these questions and produced a product that is both fresh and artistically compelling and conscious of its audience]

Recently, a friend pointed me towards an edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which the preface contained a number of critical reviews contemporary to the book’s writing. Not surprisingly the critical response was overwhelmingly negative. Naturally, my first inclination was to pooh-pooh the critics and lament their failure to recognize something great in its time. But another, more important idea struck me.

Bart:

"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."

The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.

Keeping this public record of my thoughts and experiences has forced me to consider the issue of anonymity. Originally, instinctively, I posted anonymously. The more prudent route. Eventually, two things inclined me to reconsider this choice. First of all, several discussions with friends lead me to wonder whether anonymity or exposure presents a greater obstacle to honesty. Also, as my ability to play the saxophone and compose music resurfaces, I have thought about the role that these writings, thoughts, experiences have in my art.

Today I was walking near my hotel, pondering my goal in writing. Naturally, I thought along the lines of “what overarching idea am I trying to capture?” I thought about what criticisms one might rightly raise about the consistency of my entries and their relationship to one another. Alighting on the topic of contradiction, I asked myself three questions.

Think of the smartest dog you know. Let’s call him/her Einstein. Now the dumbest. This one we’ll name George. Perhaps Einstein knows how to do more than a hundred tricks. He can smell the difference between a treat and a something he ought not to eat. Perhaps he can figure out the difference between ’sit, then roll over’ and ‘roll over, then sit.’ But that’s probably pushing it. George, on the other hand, isn’t so gifted. He’ll drink water laced with pine sol and will only respond to one command before forgetting that he should be paying attention, at which point he goes running after his tail.