is smooth jazz dead?

[alocispepraluger102]

link

"Keyboardist Jeff Lorber, who co-produced his latest release with Haslip, has some fun with the suggestion that people involved in smooth jazz might be heading for the exits: “No, they’ve already gone through the exits, they’ve taken the freeway home and they’ve gone to bed.”

Few would argue that smooth jazz is uniquely bad off. Record label dominance is over, digital music and media are ascendant, the business is being entirely remade, and opinion on the brave new online world is sharply divided. “On my desk right here I’ve got a check for zero dollars and 78 cents from YouTube licensing offers,” Saisse deadpans. “I’ve got some Spotify checks here for zero dollars nine cents. So it’s not quite making up for the royalties that we used to get from radio [laughs]. But I’m working on it. I’m collecting my zero-point-78-cent checks and we’ll see what happens.”"

[Ken Dryden]

I hope so, the format seems to have disappeared from the airwaves in many cities.

No eulogy needed.

[Daniel A]

Smooth jazz seems to be mainly an American thing. I'd dare to say that in most of Europe smooth jazz has always been close to non-existent.

[alocispepraluger102]

Smooth jazz seems to be mainly an American thing. I'd dare to say that in most of Europe smooth jazz has always been close to non-existent.

THIS BETTER THAN AVERAGE ARTICLE MAKES THAT POINT.

[Daniel A]

sorry, I only read your excerpt.

[JSngry]

Ahem...

Lorber offers a dry-eyed counterpoint. “From what I’ve heard,” he says, “the new stations haven’t done as well as the smooth-jazz stations, but they don’t care. Because they’re looking for something else that has to do with the way these big corporations bundle their advertising. For whatever reason the smooth-jazz demographic didn’t work into that plan.”

One factor might have been that the smooth-jazz crowd is heavily mixed. “That was a revelation to me,” Veasley says, “when I started playing concerts and seeing how racially diverse the audience was. I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what it should be. It can’t be anything but good.’ When I got involved on the other side of the glass I started to understand that it was exactly the wrong recipe for radio sales. In other words, to go in and say, ‘Wow, we have this audience that is 50-50 white and black, male and female, with a wide age demographic’—that doesn’t appeal to people who pay for radio.”

Satellite and Internet radio are still in their relative youth and filling the gap to a degree, though they can’t play the seamless promotional role for local events that the terrestrial stations did. Conventional radio is still in the picture: The Smooth Jazz Network maintains a number of broadcasts, including a Top 20 countdown and a newly syndicated show hosted by Kenny G, which goes out to a dozen affiliates. G is spinning the likes of Wes and Cannonball and more current artists.

It’s not clear whether this and other SJN ventures can check the downward momentum. “We’re getting the product out there in the best way we can, but certainly not to the same number of people we were five or six years ago,” Kepler says. “But if you want to see the other side of the coin, take a look at WLOQ in Orlando. We put the Smooth Jazz Network on there last August and we’re doing extremely well. I still hold out some hope—it just has to fit into the plan of the local broadcaster, and in many cases that’s going to be somebody that owns six or seven stations.”

Wasn't there a time when such concentration of ownership was illegal?

[rostasi]

I prefer chunky jazz.

[CraigP]

Wasn't there a time when such concentration of ownership was illegal?

That horse left the barn a long time ago I'm afraid.

[Guy Berger]

Great article. Shifting tastes amd demographics are doing the same thing to smooth jazz that they previously did to other jazz subgenres.

[rostasi]

I guess that this must be the future of jazz?

"Tomorrow: Kenny G on his audience, the demise of smooth, and his burgeoning comedy career"?

[alocispepraluger102]

until jazz achieves some relevance to the contemporary world, it has no future other than as a museum and university artifact.

[JSngry]

Wasn't there a time when such concentration of ownership was illegal?

That horse left the barn a long time ago I'm afraid.

Exactly.

Think of the implications of something that has a "mixed" demographic (and a relatively affluent one at that) not being "appealing" to media ownerships...would the converse of that then be that media ownerships prefer formats that discourage a mixed demographic and instead foster an insular one, or at least a generic one?

This is like back in the day when you could go to a Cannonball gig and see all kinds of people turning out, and you'd hear Cannonball giving all of them something to latch on to. A wide net was being cast. Now it looks like a wide net is being frowned upon, or at least that the fish are being engineered to all be the same fish that fit the same one wide net. My concern is not Smooth Jazz per se, hell fuck Smooth Jazz per se, but rather the, like the man said, "middle" and what happens when everything is a "specialty" music except for the one big blob in the middle that is interchangeable parts that you can buy anywhere, but especially Wal-Mart, walk right in, sit right down, daddy let your mind...roll into a box and be put away for the collection. How is that good?

Brrrrrr,,,,it's chilly in here...

[Dan Gould]

To me the most interesting part of the article comes at the very end:

Tomorrow: Kenny G on his audience, the demise of smooth, and his burgeoning comedy career.

[alocispepraluger102]

makes me think kenny was a joker all along and the fans were too dumb........

one new years eve i spent in vegas, kenny tickets were at least double those of earth, wind, and fire at the MGM.

[John L]

Smooth jazz seems to be mainly an American thing. I'd dare to say that in most of Europe smooth jazz has always been close to non-existent.

They still play a lot of smooth jazz in West Africa, believe it or not. But not all smooth jazz is alike. African smooth jazz is played seriously and has a lot of spirit. I guess that some people would say that it is therefore not smooth jazz. ))

[Tom 1960]

one new years eve i spent in vegas, kenny tickets were at least double those of earth, wind, and fire at the MGM.

Can you imagine spending your New Year's Eve listening to that shit?

[slide_advantage_redoux]

It certainly isn't dead in the club scene, at least in the D/FW area. There are many so-called jazz clubs that offer this sort of tripe.

[rostasi]

Smooth jazz isn't dead - it just swells funny.

[Christiern]

I always thought it was stillborn.

[fasstrack]

I prefer chunky jazz.

Jiffy, or the fancy-pants organic stuff?

[medjuck]

Lorber offers a dry-eyed counterpoint. “From what I’ve heard,” he says, “the new stations haven’t done as well as the smooth-jazz stations, but they don’t care. Because they’re looking for something else that has to do with the way these big corporations bundle their advertising. For whatever reason the smooth-jazz demographic didn’t work into that plan.”

One factor might have been that the smooth-jazz crowd is heavily mixed. “That was a revelation to me,” Veasley says, “when I started playing concerts and seeing how racially diverse the audience was. I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what it should be. It can’t be anything but good.’ When I got involved on the other side of the glass I started to understand that it was exactly the wrong recipe for radio sales. In other words, to go in and say, ‘Wow, we have this audience that is 50-50 white and black, male and female, with a wide age demographic’—that doesn’t appeal to people who pay for radio.”

I never understood Smooth Jazz or its audience but this in interesting. The scariest thing about audiences I've noticed is how old they are for most of the music I like. My wife went to see Henry Gray (sp?) Howlin' Wolf's pianist last week and she said no one in the audience except her was under 80! I always thought that the blues had a young following but I am probably 30 years behind the times. I recently saw Jim Kweskin with Geoff Mudar and they joked that their audience was old people with their parents. Not that young people don't like good music. Last night I saw The Black Keys and the audience was pretty mixed in age.

I remember about 15 years ago my daughter complained that all the rock stations she liked were changing their format to Smooth Jazz. Now they seem to be changing to Christian Talk RAdio.