Jazz: Who's Listening?

 

My entrée to the latest jazz-world debate arrives a few paces behind the blogosphere, mainly for practical reasons. In the week after Newport, I found myself completely (and gratefully) submerged in work, barely able to come up for air. But the extra time also allowed me to take a step back and consider my response.

It’s all pretty much there in the piece, but it may be worth mentioning that I spoke to a handful of musicians in preparation. Here’s one point made by Scott Amendola, drummer and bandleader, pictured above at a gig in Berkeley, Calif., which he calls home:

I feel like young people are really enthusiastic about music that is sort of played for music’s sake, and that this whole commodification, this whole idea of putting jazz on a pedestal, is something they hate. People are so turned off by that shit.

I almost put that quote in the piece, minus the last sentence. Like the other musicians mentioned therein, Amendola is a good example of a jazz-and-beyond artist whose work (and audience!) complicates the metric for any surveying apparatus. In the coming weeks, he’ll be playing gigs with his own trio (Monk meets groove), the Nels Cline Singers (rock/jazz/world/noise), and the Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq (um, “????”). At any rate, feel free to add to this discussion, though I suspect that the internets have already had their say.

On a largely unrelated note, I have so far had a policy of keeping the blog (mostly) clear of links to day-to-day reviews, features, etc. Over the weekend, some perceptive and blog-literate friends have convinced me to reconsider. So from here on out, I’ll be posting more of that professional flotsam. To get the ball rolling:

Playlist, Arts & Leisure

Ledisi, Hollenbeck, Perowsky, Nisennenmondai, Benson

Critic’s Choice: New CDs

Pissed Jeans, Joe Henry 

Mostly Other People Do the Killing

At Zebulon, Aug. 12

J.D. Allen Trio

At Vanguard, Aug. 10

And a future programming note: my JazzTimes cover story, on Nels Cline, should be out in a few weeks. I hope people will actually go out and buy a copy. (Get this month’s issue too, with Joe Lovano on the cover.) Later this month I’ll post some outtakes from the Cline interviews, for your distraction and potential enjoyment. 

Comments

[John Smith]

Jazz is dead - it ceased to be a living art form in the late 1970s and its residual audience gets older and smaller with every year that passes. Subsequently, it's been partially re-created as a copy of its former self. The apprenticeship for Jazz musicians was the big bands but they've gone. The popular tunes of the 1930s and 40s had sophisticated harmonies that made them ideal vehicles for improvisation; popular tunes today are harmonically crass. And Jazz was always quintessentially bohemian but since its death its corpse has been stolen by music colleges who offer degrees in Jazz studies - what could be more inappropriately bourgeois? No wonder the few young players who perform it nowadays, though competent technically, are invariably artistically mediocre at best and often poor.

[matana roberts]

i think some of us have to rewind and take a more punk rock approach to getting our musical sounds and opinions circulating. Most of my peers are I think, but some folks( like Terry Teachout maybe? and some musicians who i wont mention, but who wont come out of their holes unless prestige of some type is involved) are not always paying attention to that. Those efforts wont always show up in the press either but it will push things along in ways i don't think we can even fathom at this point.... That's just my opinion. music for the people, by the people.just some thoughts.

Interesting discussion either way and I congratulate Mr. Teachout for sparking what in some ways is a very old debate, but is worth talking about even now.

[J.D. Considine]

Sorry to be arriving so late to this party -- hey, it's August -- but Nate is right to doubt blind reliance on the figures offered by the NEA.

For one thing, the survey posits everything in terms of percentages, so the could argue, for instance, that the jazz audience had declined 19 percent between 1982 and 2008. But if you sit down and compute what those percentages mean in actual numbers, a different picture emerges. In 1982, the jazz audience -- 9.2 percent of the US population -- amounted to 22,239,788. In 2008, the jazz audience -- then just 7.8 percent of the US population -- totaled 23,166,658. So despite the percentile "drop" in audience, jazz had 962,870 more active fans in 2008 than in 1982.

Some decline.

Like everyone else, I've also seen enough "anecdotal evidence" about the age of jazz fans to further doubt the survey's results. But like Mr. Teachout, I don't really see anecdotal evidence as much of an argument. So when I wrote about this for the Globe and Mail last week, I cited audience research from the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, According to FIJM's figures for 2008, the 18-44 year old demographic -- the one the NEA numbers says is deserting jazz -- comprised 55 percent of the audience for the festival's outdoor events. Even more telling, that same demographic made up 61 percent of the crowd for the ticketed indoor events. (The polling was done for FIJM by Ipsos Descarie.)

Finally, I'd like to chime in with everyone who has pointed out that a nationally weighted poll is going to unfairly gauge interest in jazz for the simple reason that professional jazz is not universally available in the US. (I'd bet serious money the numbers would have been different had high school performances not been excluded.)

That's especially the case if you compare the active audience numbers the NEA has compiled to its music preference figures. Table 4 from the NEA data, which lists music preferences, shows that 24.2 percent of Americans say they "like" jazz. Granted, only 6 percent list jazz as what they "like best," but that's still a higher percentage than the 5.7 percent earned by Rap/hip-hop. (Which should be another red flag, but let's go on.)

Seems to me that the poll would have been more instructive had it included a question to ascertain whether those who answered "no" whether they'd attended jazz concerts actually had the opportunity to do so. Passing on jazz is one thing, not having the opportunity is something else again.

But hey, it's just one survey. There will always be others.

[Matt Rubin]

Great Article Nate. I touched on similar concerns about the methodology of the NEA survey in my blog post, "The Jazz Audience Smells Funny..."

I've also been thinking lately about the regional distribution of the jazz audience. I suspect that there is a much greater concentration of youthful jazz enthusiasts in the NYC area than there is in the Boise, Idaho area. That's convenient, because there is also a much greater concentration of jazz musicians in the NYC area. However, if the NEA survey used some sort of representative national sample, then the numbers for total participation would be significantly lower than the numbers in major metropolitan areas. This might explain the disparity between the report's findings and all the anecdotal evidence.

Where's Nate Silver when you need him? Are there any statistical analysts/jazz enthusiasts who could tackle this problem?

[David Freedman]

I think Nate's take is correct and I too don't trust the numbers Teachout cites. I've been listening to and reading about the music for 40 years. It's demise has been predicted throughout that period, yet I am still amazed by the number of new musicians and bands that keep coming forward. I was in NYC in June and went to four different clubs; each was full with people of all ages. There might be some festivals suffering during this recession but I am certain when I go to Monterey next month the place will be packed as always. Jazz has always had a limited audience and its musicians will always sacrifice to keep it alive. That's no reason for useless hand wringing.

[David Weiss]

First off, just a little common sense argument to this supposition that there isn't a young crowd out there supporting jazz. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of young musicians out here trying to be jazz musicians. They are either in school or just coming to New York trying to make it or have modest careers already. If I am to believe what I've read, does this mean that pretty much everyone under 30 who likes jazz is a jazz musician or trying to become one? That seems hard to believe. If jazz is reaching the youth enough for them to try to be jazz musicians then the music is speaking to that generation and there are fans out there.
Logic aside, I can also go on personal experience. I sort of live on both sides of the fence as it were and can relate my experiences from both sides. As a sidemen or instigator of sports, I've worked with Freddie Hubbard, Charles Tolliver, Bobby Hutcherson and a lot of other greats from those generations. Usually the crowds I play for with those guys is an older crowd though there is some youth in the audience. However, we are usually playing in the higher priced venues around the world and these places don't really cater to the youth of today and vice-a-versa. I recently did a tour of Germany with a group called The Cookers. The group comprised of Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, George Cables, Cecil McBee and Billy Hart. In the venues where I could see the audience (it's harder to see the audience in the larger concert hall type venues), I think I saw only one woman my age or younger in the audience the whole week we were there. Everyone in the audience was around the age of the other guys in the band. Now this is unusual but certainly got me thinking a bit about the future of this music. On the other hand, these older guys mentioned above still are some of the most creative musicians working today and still approach every gig with a freshness and youthful exuberance that is infectious and I'm sure would go over great with the younger jazz fans if they knew about it. I think sometimes the youth of today might be a little obsessed with what is going on a the moment, the hottest new thing etc and might sleep on some of the other music being created out here. This is true of even the some of the young musicians. A young musician recently did a gig with me with the Charles Tolliver Big Band and heard Billy Harper for the first time. He went out and bought all his CDs the next day. Somebody above also talked of turning some kids onto Henry Threadgill with the same enthusiastic results. On the flipside, if the road to discovery of some of these guys is paying $40 to go to the Blue Note, that might be a little prohibitive for most. To try and combat this problem, a few years ago I curated a late night series at the Irdium Jazz Club. The bands played one set at midnight on Friday and Saturday and the cover charge was $10. We had everyone from Vijay Iyer to Kneebody to Dave Binney and the series was a moderate success (some sold out nights to some nights where there were 10 people in the audience). It needed a chance to grow and wasn't given that but if the major clubs in New York are going to keep in step with what's going on out here, then more of this needs to happen. I played the Blue Note late night series recently (a strong, interestingly booked series by the way) and there was a strong crowd of all generations (though the older audience members might have just stuck around after hearing Ahmad Jamal)
On the other side of the coin, all the bands I've led have had sidemen in it that were still in college or just out of college when I put the groups together so these groups have a much younger audience. My last band got it's start by playing every Thursday night in Fat Cat (for around 6 months or so) in New York a couple of years ago. At the time, the wall that separated the club from the pool hall was still up and it was an ideal place to play, comfortable and with great sound. This attracted a much younger audience that was probably drawn in by the cheap cover charge and the comfortable, informal room and hopefully the band. Some of them might have been more familiar with my young sidemen at first but seemingly liked the band and we developed a nice following. When Fat Cat closed temporarily we began to play around town a bit more but most often at 55 Bar, another comfortable, informal room with a cheap cover charge. The audience there was quite youthful as well so I've seen with my own eyes that there is a young audience out here for this music. When all is said and done, I probably prefer performing in rooms like 55 Bar than most other venues. The informal, relaxed setting and the close proximity to the audience is conducive to creating an atmosphere where one feels no constraints and can be as creative as possible.
If you read DownBeats from the '50s and '60s, you can see that the death knell of jazz has been written about many times throughout the years so this is really nothing new. Besides the over reliance on numbers instead of eyewitness accounts (did Teachout ever go to a Bad Plus gig and see for himself or ask any of the musicians with young followings like Brian Blade or Kurt Rosenwinkle what their audiences were like), Teachout also points to the demise or downsizing of some jazz festivals as proof it's all over. This is problematic as well as many are thriving and the ones that aren't are probably hurting because they've lost sponsorship. If your festival was funded by banks in the past, this isn't going to be a good year for you. A bad economy is not a compelling argument for the downfall of jazz. In the overall scope of things that's just a blip, a phase that surely will pass.
By the way Nate, while the article is great, I have to wonder if the accompanying photo which shows an attentive audience of 9 or so is helping to make your argument.

[Jackson Moore]

With respect to popular appeal, I feel that there has been a latent sea change. Fifteen years ago jazz instrumentation felt anachronistic in the context of pop culture; nowadays what was an anachronism feels more like an untapped vein of fashion for the most advanced hipsters. The various generic sheens of Jazz have become something of a carrot that draws people in to discover an idiom that turns out to be futurist. DJA's use of the Steampunk aesthetic sums up this duality perfectly.

A popular culture that's starting to wander into its own history in search of new stimulation is predisposed to a domino effect of interest in jazz. Just last week I played the latest Threadgill album for some new acquaintances - young, successful entrepreneurs with an active interest in the latest indie rock, etc. - and their eyes bugged out of their heads. They were so excited.

[Lawrence Wang]

If "Jazz(TM)" dies, but there are still people out there building upon the work of the great jazz musicians and pushing the envelope... I don't see a problem :)

[Kevin Laskey]

I'm definitely with Darcy on this. The SPPA stats that show jazz's popular decline among young people like myself between 1982 and 2002 coincide with the rise of jazz neoclassicists like Wynton Marsalis. Over that time, the proliferation of recorded music (among other things) helped eliminate local jazz communities in many smaller cities (David Ake has a great paper about this), which magnified the influence of any musician who could get on the cover of a national magazine or get a multi-part public television special. This analysis may be a bit simplistic, but it does help explain both the decline of jazz's popularity on a national level (through the SPPA stats) but also the vitality of jazz in places where the music can speak for itself.

[Nate Chinen]

One interesting and perhaps telling thing about Teachout's blog riposte is his evangelistic faith in the numbers, which leads me to believe that he didn't read my piece too carefully. (Or simply won't grant me my premise.) He writes:

The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29. That's not anecdotal evidence. It's a finding from a survey jointly conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Census Bureau, and it knocks a mile-wide hole in Chinen's piece, as well as virtually everything else that's been written to date about "Can Jazz Be Saved?"

Here's the thing, Mr. Teachout: I don't trust the numbers. I have a strong suspicion that the terminology used in the survey was too vague to account for what is really happening in the music. Believe me, I spent a good amount of time studying both the surveying instrument and the user's guide in order to come to this conclusion. (Those links will pop up as PDFs, FYI.) This is why I spent so much time in the piece knocking around the word "jazz," and considering the ways in which its evolution (corruption?) might have affected (corrupted?) the survey results.

I was concerned that this crucial point might be missed, and it appears that at least in some cases, it has. The anecdotal stuff was color: I wanted to include for illustrative purposes (and to plug a few deserving gigs/artists, I'm happy to admit). If somehow I'm still failing to get my point across, Peter Margasak sums up the faulty-survey aspect of my argument nicely, before making some more (gasp!) eye-witness observations of his own.

But I also want to say: I had no intention of impugning the reputations of either Teachout or Gioia, both of whom I have found many occasions to admire. I just think they have it wrong. And I think the NEA/Census Bureau didn't have the tools to get it right.

[DJA]

I am sure you saw Teachout's somewhat testy reply.

While I am generally sympathetic to "the plural of anecdote is not data" arguments, for me the crux is the final sentence of Teachout's WSJ piece:

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.

Attention Mr. Teachout: on behalf of every jazz musician I know under the age of 40, we are already doing that. Our problem is not getting the kids to turn out for our shows -- the kids are frequently the only people who turn out for our shows. Our problem is getting everyone else to take a break from fetishizing the jazz of 50 years ago and pay attention to what's happening right now. If you want to know who's to blame for the aging jazz audience, it's those who constantly ignore and marginalize forward-thinking young jazz musicians.

[Ian Carey]

I think Scott's got a good point--I've often felt torn between marketing my music in the straightahead "jazz bag," going for the wine-drinking middle-aged crowd that frequents places like the Blue Note and Yoshi's, or accentuating the more experimental aspects and going for the younger, less jazz-identified audience who do, as he points out, hate that shit. Failure to really make a decision in one direction or the other can end up getting a musician stranded in the middle, I fear...

[Michael J. West]

I loved the NYT article and linked to it on Facebook.

In terms of the discussion I can say this: I'm 30 years old, and 2002 (the year in which the NEA's apparent decline in young people's jazz appreciation began) marks roughly the time when my interest in jazz skyrocketed. 1992, the previous reporting year to that, is about the time my interest in jazz STARTED. So either I'm seriously against the grain, or the analysis just isn't getting it right.

Incidentally, the main factor responsible for my gaining interest in jazz was public radio. So I was fascinated with your reference to Arbitron's public radio survey that said jazz was the only format gaining 18-24 listenership. So many people in this discussion have been preoccupied with "How do we reach young people with jazz?" There, perhaps, is your answer.