Jazz Now

By Howard Mandel

At the turn of the 20th Century, jazz is the music best set to flourish in the 21st. True, such commercial indices as record sales might seem to belie that thought, and the scant attention that mass media, celebrity-driven electronic broadcasts, and publications pay to jazz might seem to deny it. But in 1998 jazz was demonstrably for everyone, everywhere: at such prestigious concert venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in the parks and streets of many North American cities, in countless restaurants, night clubs, dance halls, and in cyberspace, too.

PLAY OF THE LAND

Jazz is accessible, one way or another, throughout the United States and well beyond. Classic, traditional, and mainstream contemporary jazz may not get the big hype, bold marketing, and broad distribution of pop, rap, or country & western-based styles, but the jazz sound-sophisticated yet bluesy, assertive and subtly rhythmic-is beamed far and wide by commercial smooth jazz stations and public radio network programs, some of them streaming 24 hours daily on the Internet. Meanwhile, private cable TV outfits such as Black Entertainment Television/BET (which in 1998 agreed to acquire George Wein's unrivaled Festival Productions company) and low-budget, local-access channels alike cast their lots with jazz.

Today more than ever before, jazz riffs, jazz phrasing, jazz orchestration, and jazz clichés permeate television scores, movie soundtracks, theater music, and ballet commissions. Jazz is a shared musical language, equal to the devotions of the diehards, earning the support of public and private foundations, open to most any scale of entrepreneurship, surmounting even the casual disregard of the average listener.

Jazz is in the advertising air-literally, as Gap models leap to jingles from the '30s swing band revival. Indeed, jazz pumps up many commercial projects, and sometimes entire economies: consider the jazz-related recording and performing businesses of New York City and Los Angeles, the municipally supported, city-wide jazz festivals of New Orleans, Newport, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Monterey. Extend that to Canada (Vancouver, Montreal, Victoriaville, Ottawa), to Havana and Trinidad/Tobago, to London, Montreux, Berlin, Rio de Janiero, Pori, Tampere, and Helsinki, Finland; to Istanbul, Haifa, Calcutta, Moscow, Beijing-all sites of jazz assemblies and conventions. That's some fest circuit!

According to Musical America's own polling, almost one-third of the managers of performing artists-140 of 445 in the United States, and 149 of 536 worldwide-represent jazz musicians. Of 446 performing arts festivals in the United States, 189 report that they've staged at least one concert of jazz; of 856 around the world, 224 say they are at the very least open to the music.

An estimated 500 dedicated jazz festivals range from the tony Newport, Rhode Island, August weekend that producer George Wein initiated in the 1950s to Calcutta, India's biennial Jazz Yatra, and annual events in Umbria, Italy, the Hague, and the Bahamas, among scores more. A new crop of stateside fests is striking: jazz has become an off-season attraction in such tourist meccas as Colorado's Telluride ski resort and Rebhopah Beach, Virginia (a two-hour car ride from both Philadelphia and Baltimore). Champagne-picnic audiences fill the summer lawns at classical camps like Tanglewood in the Berkshires, Fairfax, Virginia's Wolf Trap, Atlanta's Chastain Park, Westchester County's Caramoor estate, and suburban Chicago's Ravinia Park.

Of 1,884 performing arts centers across the country surveyed by Musical America, a whopping 1,207 book jazz artists, many of them organizing specially dedicated jazz series. Some of these may be light symphonic "pops" concerts, or one-time guest shots of jazz-related artists with conventional orchestras. But as Rob Gibson, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, says, "Audiences are hungry for swing and blues." Those are two musical elements that his program, arguably the highest profile and most ambitious jazz presenter on earth, has identified as jazz essentials-a conclusion reached by the informal Lincoln Center brain trust that comprises trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, writer Albert Murray, and cultural gadfly Stanley Crouch.

BOOM TIME

"Jazz presenting by arts organizations is at an all-time high right now around the country," asserts Gibson. "Yes, there's more jazz happening," concurs Anthony Tappia of the Association of Performing Arts and Presenters, and director of the Arts Partners Project, APAP's collaboration with the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund. According to Scott Southard, a booking agent for a roster of top-ranking jazz veterans who used to depend on extended engagements in a circuit of privately owned and operated urban U.S. entertainment venues, the current activity represents "a significant shift out of the night club business into cultural arts centers, universities, and festivals."

Such overviews of the jazz scene-at-large-a panorama in perpetual flux-are surely based on subjective and anecdotal evidence, yet they tend to validate all investigations into contemporary jazz life that peek beneath its obvious surface. That surface is the recording industry, some of whose members frequently claim or are proclaimed to be commanders of the jazz business. Their view of jazz is, understandably, dim: according to data compiled by Soundscan and the Recording Industry Association of America, jazz accounted for a tiny fraction of record sales-2.8 percent of a $12-billion industry in 1997, down more than 2 full points from 1989.

Talk to people deeply involved in their own jazz enterprises, though, and there's plenty of street-smart testimony in the face of the meager hard evidence that general interest in live jazz is healthy, and its overall influence is as great or greater than ever before.

"Audience reception of jazz has definitely changed," reports Rory MacPherson, a program officer of the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, which has contributed some $24 million since 1990 to a nationwide variety of jazz projects, including a 20-site jazz touring program. "In the past decade jazz has achieved a higher profile and earned greater respect. Just look at Wynton Marsalis teaming up with Seiji Ozawa for the PBS series `Marsalis on Music.' Think of the Peabody awards given to the National Public Radio series `Making the Music' and `Jazz From Lincoln Center.

'"This greater level of admiration and higher profile doesn't just come from jazz's traditional audiences, either," MacPherson maintains, nodding towards both the vast listenership to urban contemporary smooth-jazz radio and critical mass of another stripe. "It comes from real aficionados of all types of music."

OLD AND NEW ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES

"You can't be without Kind of Blue in your collection any longer," insists Don Lucoff, an independent jazz publicist, referring to trumpeter Miles Davis' masterpiece of 1959 (recorded by Columbia). "Or, if you're really hip, A Love Supreme," saxophonist John Coltrane's enduring album of 1964 (on Impulse). "You've got to know these albums, not just as a jazz fan, but as a music fan. And this will be the case for generations to come. After all, Kind of Blue has sold almost half a million records since it was reissued in 1997. It's a gold record many times over since it first came out."

Lucoff watches jazz release schedules closely, and points to a pattern. "It's no accident that all the major labels are milking their catalogs with enormous numbers of concept compilations," he says, "trying to reach the uninitiated consumer via `jazz at midnight,' `jazz for lovers'-and then appealing to completists at the other end of the spectrum in a way they never have before, with boxed sets featuring unreleased tracks and explanatory material.

"The heightened awareness of jazz in our culture is due to aging baby boomers looking for more sophisticated music, and finding jazz in their lives thanks to Madison Avenue," he theorizes. "Jazz is being marketed today as American, hip, and trendy, whereas even in the '70s it still had the stigma of drugs and smokey dens of iniquity."

From a slightly different perspective, booker Southard arrives at the same point. "I consistently hear complaints from my clients about the jazz touring market getting softer," he concedes, "but I take a different position. Jazz is now more broadly embraced by a larger public, so jazz artists are seeing far larger audiences, and a more diverse set of venues and presentations. Whether these are profit-based or not-for-profit venues doesn't matter. They're one-and-the-same in terms of market perspective-that is, how they spend money on jazz."

Whose jazz do they buy? Well, among jazz's handful of survivors from the swing heyday we might mention Claude "Fiddler" Williams, the spry nonagenarian who entertained President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary at the White House and was one of 15 master artists receiving 1998 National Heritage Fellowship awards. Post-WWII bebop revolutionaries are today's most invaluable elders (especially considering that jazz wisdom has long been passed from teacher to apprentice), but their ranks are inevitably thinning. The death of vocalist Betty Carter at age 69 in October 1998 was a terrible loss, as she was an irreplaceable original voice and strict trainer of promising up-and-comers in her bands and through the Jazz Ahead! weekends she launched in 1993.

The jazz generation that emerged in the mid-to-late '50s and '60s-including the many protégés of iconographic trumpeter Miles Davis, and followers of the spiritually attuned saxophonist John Coltrane-are still mostly in their prime. The musicians who followed them, including iconoclastic composer-performers Ornette Coleman and pianist Cecil Taylor and members of their circles are still challenging musical assumptions, and not just in jazz. Similarly, heroes of the electric jazz that burst out in the late '60s remain powerful figures, though several of them have realigned or refined their styles and approaches.

And then there's the pride of young lions who came running from the territories after the rise of Wynton Marsalis in the 1980s to an unprecedented level of impact in the 1990s.

Marsalis, still under 40, is a multi-dimensional star: a virtuoso in both classical Western European and traditional jazz repertory, the able artistic director of groundbreaking Jazz at Lincoln Center, composer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields (the first jazz work so honored), standard-bearer of a jazz orchestra that makes audience education a major component of its exhausting tour schedule, and a spokesman for jazz to all with ears. Other trumpeters (including Jon Faddis, leader of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, and Roy Hargrove) and brassmen, as well as reedists, pianists, bassists, drummers, vocalists, and even violinists have benefited from his example and energies.

But Marsalis has never been alone at the jazz apex. Musicians of diverse backgrounds and inclinations join him there, including his own older brother Branford. A tenor saxophonist who formerly led television's The Tonight Show band, Branford gained notoriety hosting the National Public Radio series "Jazz Set" and in 1998 ascended to a post of potentially great power as the new director of the jazz A&R department at Columbia Records.

Consider, too, drummer T.S. Monk. Son of the unique jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, T.S. established a Washington, D.C.-based foundation in his father's name that holds annual competitions for jazz players judged by top-flight professionals. Ironically, the 1998 contest for jazz singers was held the week Betty Carter died . The Monk Foundation also hosts a two-week, all-expenses-paid summer program for 25 jazz wannabes called Jazz Aspen Snowmass, and a two-year program offering tuition at Berklee School of Music, plus room, board, and all expenses, to as many as a dozen hand-picked students. Their semesters climax in international tours with their marquee-name professors.

CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION

In fall of 1995 the Monk Institute opened a West Coast office with the status of "resident company" in the Music Center of Los Angeles County. Herbie Hancock, pianist, recording artist, and former host of the PBS music series "Rock School," serves as artistic director there. The Monk Institute has facilitated instrument training and jazz mentorships for area high school students, performances by the students' ensembles at community gatherings, including pro sports events, and open-to-the-public jazz history "master class/concerts" in the Music Center's Grand Hall.

A jazz-dedicated, Disney-financed hall for the Monk Institute's programs is under construction at the Music Center-and an even more dramatic expansion was announced in February 1998 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has backed plans for a major state-of-the-art performing arts and education building devoted to Lincoln Center's jazz constituent at the site of the old New York Coliseum in Columbus Circle.

Such ambitious building is not feasible for most jazz-related institutions-but neither is it the only way to go. Rather than breaking new ground, the Smithsonian Institution, for instance, has established a Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, directed by Indiana University jazz educator David Baker. Similar ensembles, using currently available facilities, have been founded elsewhere.

Thankfully, the greatest development in jazz is not of real estate but of musicians. Hard though it is to instill conservatory-trained players with blues and swing, teachers keep trying. The International Association of Jazz Educators drew approximately 10,000 students, teachers, instrument manufacturers, music publishers, producers, organizers, agents, and journalists to its annual meeting in New York's Times Square in January 1998, and convenes again in January 1999 in Anaheim, California.

"There's a dearth of blues and swing," warns Jazz at Lincoln Center's Gibson, "and we need more of those qualities. They're at the roots of the jazz tradition, and it's important they continue to be taught-which is the hardest part of it."

 His organization does its part; J@LC estimates its educational programs will reach "over 70,000 students, teachers, and audience members in the 1998-99 season." The Doris Duke Foundation has generously donated funds to enlarge Jazz at Lincoln Center's annual competition for high school bands studying charts by Duke Ellington in 1999, to commemorate the centennial of his birth and to further promote him as one of America's greatest composers. In the wake of the many programs in 1998 hailing the centennial of George Gershwin's birth, the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation has earmarked $1 million for J@LC to create a "Louis Armstrong Jazz Curriculum Project" culminating in the year 2000, the hundredth birthday of that exemplary American.

Gratifying and productive as such initiatives are, the major impetus of jazz comes from its present, and now as for decades past, New York City is Jazz Central. The clubs in the Village and Harlem, hither and yon, are active year-round, but June especially was jazz month in 1998. This was due (and will be due again in 1999) to the Texaco Jazz Festival offering some 350 concerts during the month's first two weeks all around town, and the JVC Jazz Festival filling the bigger midtown halls for the last two weeks. Last year, on the day between the competing fests, the Knitting Factory presented the 1998 New York Jazz Awards-a first-of-its-kind gala benefit for Music Cares and the Jazz Foundation of America, in which jazz journalists and jazz industry representatives honored key jazz instrumentalists and recordings.

Does such a bounty of jazz suggest that everyone jump to partake of the riches? APAP's Anthony Tappia advises his tempted membership to proceed with caution.

"Any classical-music presenter thinking about it should ask themselves why they want to present jazz," he says. "Once they explore that, then they should approach the music as they would classical music, in terms of their inquiry into the music.

"They need to take the same care and concern about the artists and music as they would if they were booking a classical offering. If they don't have the knowledge, it behooves them to do the research-by talking with colleagues, going to artists' managers, searching on the Internet, reading jazz publications, and even seeking out residents of their communities who have the knowledge, like local jazz musicians. Best of all, they should go to performances themselves.

"We've seen in the successful projects we've funded that the commitment to jazz needs to be there," he continues. "Jazz may have the potential to bring a larger proportion of the total available audience to the presenter, but that may be an audience the presenter doesn't know, or a group with which they've never before interacted. Are they willing to have that exchange? And if an organization wants to introduce jazz to its primarily classical-music audience, it has to seriously invest in providing information and education so that audience can learn more about jazz.

"Presenting jazz can be an exciting adventure," Tappia concludes, "but it is that-an adventure into new territory, that may lead to mistakes. You hope by committing to that direction, by testing and trying to learn, you can figure out a path that works for you, for your existing audience and a potential new audience, too. But it takes time to introduce jazz to classical audiences, and the promised rewards are not something presenters will see overnight."

Granted, to appreciate jazz if one never has before, requires new energy and thought. But where there's an investment, there's a payoff-because jazz is one American creation, idea, musical art, and entertainment that works. Its basic structure embodies America's ideals and aspirations, as jazz is built on individual excellence and collective contribution. Jazz sings to the soul while beguiling the mind, and jazz holds firmly to traditional values while embracing change and maintaining adaptability at its core.

Jazz now suffuses culture and commerce, through its musical substance and elevated performance standards no less than through its words and images. In America and increasingly around the world, media and merchandise are cool or hot; swing is again or still the big dance craze, and no one ever wants to be thought square.

Howard Mandel has written for more than 20 years on jazz, blues, and new and unusual music. A two-time winner of the Deems Taylor ASCAP award for excellence in music journalism and president of the Jazz Journalists Association, he currently contributes to Down Beat (he's a former editor), Jazziz and The Wire magazines, and National Public Radio's Sunday Morning Edition. His book Future Jazz is due from Oxford University Press in spring of 1999.