Jazz Now

By Howard Mandel

The roll call attests to Holiday's adage: Blessed talent gives life to music, and you've either got it or you don't. All that anyone else can provide is opportunity, a forum, a platform. And what they give may be all too easily taken away.

"Its own" is just what jazz needs, and has relied on in 2002: its own indefatigable will to survive, its own confidence in its own standards for success, its own faith that however glum the jazz business may seem, jazz music cannot be denied. The contributions jazz made during the past months to citizens of the U.S. and the world, troubled by economic implosion and reactions to terrorist attack, have been substantial, though they elude quantification. The troubles jazz suffered during 2002 are relatively slight but, sadly, easier to enumerate.

Consider: This was the year Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl each dropped their support of acclaimed orchestras run by admired, virtuosic professionals-trumpeter Jon Faddis and bassist John Clayton, respectively; neither change of focus was attributed to financial concerns. In 2002, National Public Radio "reorganized" both familiar and new nationally broadcast jazz shows and initiatives off the air in favor of more news and information programming, which is thought to attract more contributions from listeners. As during previous years over the last decade, few jazz recordings cracked 10,000 in sales in 2002, and reissues typically gave new productions a run for the money. The one verifiable commercial "jazz" hit-platinum-selling Come Away With Me, by singer-songwriter-pianist Norah Jones-was a debut by a photogenic young artist who doesn't swing a single beat.

Furthermore: New York City, world capital of jazz, experienced a precipitous decline of visitors to its downtown entertainment district and an overall loss of tourism in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11/01. Due to earlier but continuing economic slowdowns, there was turmoil in multinational media conglomerates. This affected jazz departments at BMG, Universal Music, and Capitol/EMI, and led to bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies among record retailers and wholesale distributors, as well as far fewer corporate holiday parties. There was a resultant downturn in corporate and philanthropic largess to jazz-difficult to quantify, but ask anyone going after grants. The Doris Duke Foundation's support of jazz fellowships and career counseling, administered by Chamber Music America, remains the best help a young or emerging jazz composer-bandleader-instrumentalist can get. In consequence, artists of every stripe (including musicians who visit New York to advance their careers) reported significantly lower incomes.

The paucity of resources devoted to developing and sustaining jazz artistry flies in the face of abundant anecdotal evidence that jazz has been a boon to its audience and that jazz fandom is anything but disheartened. Indeed, many jazz fans sought out the music as a balm in the aftermath of 9/11's calamity and financial declines in 2002. Nonetheless, there being no measure of what jazz can mean to any given listener, the valuation of America's indigenous creative art music remains inestimable, however many of us insist that jazz is good for what ails us.

And the question remains: Just how many of "us" are there? According to figures from a survey commissioned by the Recording Institute Association of America (RIAA), jazz records account for just 3.4 percent of all "musical items" purchased in the year 2001, compared to 24 percent of the market going for "rock" and 3.2 percent for "classical." These figures are themselves questionable: Though Peter D. Hart Research Associates boasts that "The reliability of the data is +/- 1.8 percent at a 95 percent confidence level," the figures are not based on hard information about records shipped or sold, but rather come from a monthly national telephone survey of 3,153 music buyers, "weighted by age and sex, and then projected to reflect the U.S. population age 10 and over."

Does that mean only 107 of the telephone respondents bought jazz during the year? Exactly what does the "weighting" do? And 3.4 percent of a $13.7 billion business (which RIAA claims for the entire recording industry) equals some $465 million-not too shabby a take.

Supposing the numbers crunched above are so, what does the totality of records sold over any 12 months have to say about the state of jazz in America, anyway? There are no numbers tabulating how many people hear jazz-via live performances at festivals, concerts and clubs, radio broadcasts, television, movie soundtracks, or advertising backgrounds. There is no accounting of how many times people listen to jazz on CDs (or on such superceded formats as vinyl LPs or cassettes) they've already acquired. We don't know how many kids study jazz in high school, college, or summer camps, taking instrumental classes or participating in ensembles. In 2002, we are simply without information, and the jazz world has gotten too big and broad for any estimates to be assuredly useful, though jazz is typically thought too small to be more than a niche in the vast, hierarchical entertainment industry that runs on flash-in-the-pan superstars' megasales. (Of course, the same distinctions apply to so-called "classical" music.)

This year jazz lost several of its more enduring superstars, including the ever-rhythmic Lionel Hampton, New Orleans Olympia Brass Band founder Duke Dejean, pre-eminent modern jazz bassist Ray Brown, beloved songstress Rosemary Clooney, blues and ethnic roots musicologist Alan Lomax, funky Hammond B-3 organists Big John Patton and Shirley Scott, forever sultry Peggy Lee, and, at the end of 2001, poetic pianist Tommy Flanagan as well as that paragon of jazz promotion and production, Norman Granz.

What gains balance so much loss? Well, great music is being made across all jazz's stylistic continuum, from trad to swing to bop to mainstream to avant-garde to experimental, by people of all ages, races, and nationalities, musicians who are devoted to the art form, their collaborators, and their listeners. There are still enormous crowds flocking to jazz festivals in New Orleans, Montreal, Newport, Monterey, Chicago, Moscow (the town in Idaho), and elsewhere. And ad hoc jazz support organizations such as the Jazz Alliance International and the Jazz Foundation of America gained some ground.

The first, a not-for-profit industry association something like the Country Music Association, raised $260,000 for low-income New York City residents affected by the World Trade Towers' destruction by producing a jazz star-studded concert at Town Hall. The JAI has launched a membership campaign directed at every level of jazz makers and partakers, and donated a substantial sum to the Jazz Foundation of America's Musicians' Emergency Fund, a project that strives to save the health, homes, and lives of players who've fallen on hard times (a constant threat to freelancers who can't or don't purchase insurance and have no pension plans). The JFA itself produced its second benefit for this fund at Harlem's Apollo Theater in late September '02-the first one, in `01, was a sell-out but nonetheless raised less than what the Fund spends in a couple of months.

Equally encouraging-the U.S. government has gotten into the act. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts quietly commissioned the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College, Columbia University, to undertake "A Study of Jazz Musicians," assessing "the needs of living jazz artists and how the jazz communities differ in supporting jazz musicians in Detroit, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco." (The study, though completed, had not been released at the time of this writing.) And Federal agencies worked together in an unprecedented manner to make a lot of noise in the establishment of April as the first official Jazz Appreciation Month.

Spearheaded by John Edward Hasse, Duke Ellington biographer, jazz historian, and curator of American music for the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, JAM was conceived as an annual event akin to Black History Month, and won the support of seven different cabinet departments (Defense, State, Education, Park Service, Voice of America, National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities), the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress, besides 21 "partnering associates" including the Grammies Foundation, ASCAP, BMI, Chamber Music America, The American Library Association, the Ella Fitzgerald Foundation, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the National Association for Music Education (MENC), and the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE).

The month was launched in Washington, D.C., with the exhibition of Louis Armstrong's cornet at the Smithsonian Institution, educational and tribute programs involving the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra, and a special appearance by saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who this fall introduced the Marsalis Music label with his own recording of works by John Coltrane ("A Love Supreme") and Sonny Rollins ("Freedom Suite"). Beyond the Beltway, 19 state jazz associations (it turns out only 12 states don't have jazz associations) scheduled programs-concerts, historically oriented discussions, exhibitions, etc.-as part of JAM. The project's reach extended even farther: to Japan and East Asia (throughout which the 18-piece Pacific Showcase, part of the USAF Band based out of Yokota AFB, played classic and modern big band charts); to Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics (where tenor saxophonist Virginia Mayhew's trio toured as State Department Jazz Ambassadors, and I was honored to lecture conservatory and college students as a "jazz specialist").

What does the jazz community look like in remote, landlocked Armenia, or ostensibly booming Kiev, capital of the recently independent, struggling Ukraine? Although a jazz census in these areas would count a small and select crowd, the music is revered out of proportion to the number of its proponents for harboring strategies for self-expression, improvisation, and communication that apply to other spheres of activity, too. The eager young students, the curious radio audiences, the guys playing repertoire by Miles Davis and Bill Evans in horn combos and piano trios, the girls singing pop-jazz hits of the American '30s, '40s, and '50s were universally recognizable. One finds the same jazz prevalent much closer to home.

For instance, this year's trend in American jazz was an upsurge of interest in female vocalists, anticipated by recent successes of Diana Krall, Jane Monheit, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Dianne Reeves, capped by the aforementioned Ms. Jones, New York-born and Austin-raised and a jazz singer only by a generous stretch of the definition. She leans more toward country, given original and standard repertoire that peaks with Hank Williams's "Cold, Cold Heart." However, she has a sweet, dry delivery that lends itself to the reverberant intimacy that has served similarly crafty Cassandra Wilson well, and she has been produced by the same label as Wilson, jazz-steeped Blue Note, for the pinch of credibility that never hurts. A few jazz-identified sidemen-drummer Brian Blade, organist Sam Yahel, guitarist Bill Frisell-make appearances, too.

The CD buyers' enthusiasm doesn't, evidently, extend to male voices: Though Bobby McFerrin issued Beyond Words (also on Blue Note), his first jazz album in five years, featuring pianist Chick Corea and multi-talented electric bassist Richard Bona in playful support, its sales were not comparable to Ms. Jones's Come Away With Me. Chicagoan Kurt Elling made an effort to raise his genre's profile, convening veteran singers Jon Hendricks, Mark Murphy, and Kevin Mahogany for a triumphant concert in his hometown, but didn't generate enormous buzz (maybe more will occur when they tour in fall 2003). Tony Bennett put out a blues album, and there were polite chuckles all around. Joe Derise, a swell and influential though little-known American jazz singer (ever hear of his group, 4 Jacks and A Jill?) died this year, but there was hardly any comment of his passing, and no re-release of his urbane classic, Joe Derise: The Complete Bethlehem Collection.

Oh, well: Jazz has been, at least since World War II, predominantly a male players' music, and jazz singing has been mostly a preserve of good lookin' females. There are plenty of good-make that great!-jazz players and singers around: Scratch the superficial but omnipresent pop culture of America, and they turn up in droves. But it's as Billie Holiday sang:

"Them that's got shall get, Them that's not shall lose So the Bible says, And it still is news . . .

"The strong gets more while the weak ones fade empty pockets don't ever make the grade."

(Case in point: Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, may no longer have a Columbia Jazz contract, but his mammoth choral/orchestral work All Rise, featuring the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, has been issued by Sony Classical; it's a two-CD follow up to Marsalis's Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields. The 41-year-old trumpeter-jazz spokesman also stars in "Journey with Jazz at Lincoln Center," a new 13-part video series from cable network BETonJazz, and has been appointed to the jazz faculty of the Juilliard School.)

"Poppa may have, Mama may have, But God bless the child that's got his own, That's got his own."

Alan Greenspan couldn't have put it better. The lesson to jazz musicians, jazz fans, and jazz programmers is: Don't believe the hype. Don't depend on the record industry or private patrons to pull jazz out of its doldrums. The music's strength has always been its grass roots base of support, though they lie beneath the pop world's radar screen and beyond the classical world's field of vision. Jazz has had the energy, gumption, and imaginative harboring of fiscal resources to endure some very tough times. It actually thrived, after all, during the Great Depression. The year 2002 wasn't the worst, but it was far from the best 12 months in jazz culture's history. On the bright side, that suggests better days are sure to come.

Howard Mandel, author of Future Jazz (Oxford University Press), is at work on a book about Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor as exemplars of the avant-garde.