When Jazz Stopped Being Cool (CNN)

[Teasing the Korean]

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/25/entertainment/cnnphotos-jim-marshall-jazz/index.html

[BillF]

Well I still dig it and I'm the hippest septuagenarian in town. 

[paul secor]

I just thought that people got dumber and started to live their lives more and more on the surface. And perhaps that's a dumb thing to think, but it was true for me.

Edited September 26, 2016 by paul secor

[soulpope]

Quote

When, however, was the last time anyone associated shaking their booty to jazz music?

Unquote

Well I believe its not only (my) age which makes me move while listenig to quite some jazz recordings ....

[BeBop]

I'm so old, I remember when CNN was a respectable source for news. 

 

 

(Really?  A "Celebrity Watch" channel?)

Edited September 26, 2016 by BeBop

[JSngry]

Looks like it went from cool to cold?

[JohnS]

Music can still make me move around.  I clap, stomp and play air drums regularly.

[GA Russell]

Thanks very much for this, TTK!

1)  It was my observation at the time that Americans who entered college in 1961 thought it was very uncool to continue to do high school things like listen to rock 'n' roll.  But Americans who started college in 1965 did not feel that way.  The class of '65 bought Sinatra and jazz records, but the class of '69 bought Beatles records.

2)  I think the sales number of Kind of Blue doesn't mean anything, just like the sales number of Bitches Brew didn't prove anything.  If in the past fifteen years the sales of '50s and '60s jazz recordings have exceeded the sales of current releases, maybe it's because not even jazz fans are particularly interested in what today's jazz musicians are doing.

Edited September 26, 2016 by GA Russell

[Chuck Nessa]

sigh.

[Jim R]

3 hours ago, GA Russell said:

It was my observation at the time that Americans who entered college in 1961 thought it was very uncool to continue to do high school things like listen to rock 'n' roll.  But Americans who started college in 1965 did not feel that way.  The class of '65 bought Sinatra and jazz records, but the class of '69 bought Beatles records.

In that last sentence, did you mean to say "The class of '61 bought Sinatra and jazz records, but the class of '65 bought Beatles records."?  If not, I'm not sure your thoughts are tying together properly.

[danasgoodstuff]

1 hour ago, Jim R said:

In that last sentence, did you mean to say "The class of '61 bought Sinatra and jazz records, but the class of '65 bought Beatles records."?  If not, I'm not sure your thoughts are tying together properly.

No, 'class of' is year finished so the class of 65 entered in 61...

[Teasing the Korean]

4 hours ago, Jim R said:

In that last sentence, did you mean to say "The class of '61 bought Sinatra and jazz records, but the class of '65 bought Beatles records."?  If not, I'm not sure your thoughts are tying together properly.

He is talking about the year they started, so students entering college in 1961 were the class of 1965, assuming everything went as planned. 

[Jim R]

I see now, thanks.  

I guess for me, "class of 'XX" has an even stronger association with high school graduating classes than college (among people I've known, at least), so that's where my brain went first.  It seems more common in my experience for people to ask what year you graduated from high school as opposed to college, in other words.  People are slightly less likely to complete college in four years than they are to complete high school in four years, and thus there's less of an automatic gauge there to judge how old someone is (for example) by asking them what year they graduated.  Also, the size and diversity of college student bodies has always struck me as being further from the concept of a "class" of students (as compared to that of a high school).

But I was still wrong, and I'm owning it.  

[Gheorghe]

Nice photo of the audience from 1960, would have liked to have such a hip audience.

In the late 70´s , that´s when people like Herbie Hancock returned for some acoustic projects "VSOP", and old masters like Dex and Griff made it again in the States and became top acts , there was a renewed interest in the kind of jazz that people might have heard in 1960.

But then, at least in Europe, the average jazz listener was sloppily dressed. Now, young people, students are better dressed then in the 70´s, but only a few of them dig jazz.

And.... nice photo Harry James with Miles, really so nice them both smiling.....

[soulpope]

1 hour ago, Gheorghe said:

But then, at least in Europe, the average jazz listener was sloppily dressed. Now, young people, students are better dressed then in the 70´s, but only a few of them dig jazz.

 

And artists were dressend properly (sometimes) ....

Edited September 27, 2016 by soulpope

[Gheorghe]

yes, sometimes, ....... and sometimes (Berliner Jazztage) they were booed out if a singer wore an evening dress (Sarah). Others like Archie Shepp were "overdressed", I remember Archie in a club that was shambles and he was top dressed, pin striped suit, tie, expensive shoes, and it was cool.

[soulpope]

1 hour ago, Gheorghe said:

yes, sometimes, ....... and sometimes (Berliner Jazztage) they were booed out if a singer wore an evening dress (Sarah). Others like Archie Shepp were "overdressed", I remember Archie in a club that was shambles and he was top dressed, pin striped suit, tie, expensive shoes, and it was cool.

 

....

[Gheorghe]

yeah, soulpope, that´s the Shepp after 2000, saw him. Here he looks like the neatly dressed Grandpa of Jazz.

Shepp had many different dressing styles. Free Jazz Meetings in Southers Germani (Donau-Eschingen ?? ) that was kinda African Dressing Style.

 

Then, when Shepp abandoned Free Jazz and returned to standards and acoustic quartets, it seemed to me that he dressed and behaved like the Miles of the early 60´s (pin stripes, sunglasses, and payin no heed to the audience)....., and later he became more mellow, telling stories to the audience, stuff like that....

[Big Beat Steve]

Probably quite true everything mentioned so far ...

But ... that part about shaking your booty: I don't think what the author meant was people snapping their fingers, tapping their toes or even clapping when they listen (note : LISTEN!) to jazz. You CAN do that (and all the better if you do) but I think what he meant was when was the last time most everybody (or at least a sizable portion of the audience) flocked to the dance floor as soon as the first bars of a particular tune got them right "into the groove"?

So ... when WAS the last time this happened on a wider scale? And then try to answer for yourselves how oh so many of those who probably perceive themselves as being jazz connoisseurs frowned upon and sneered at those parts of jazz that DID manage to pull people to the dancefloor, be it R&B (straight from the modern jazz era onwards), oldtime/dixieland jazz or neo-swing. There were/are strains within jazz that did manage to find an audience that found it cool to attend these jazz events not least of all for the fun of partying ALL OUT to the music. But they were invariably given short shrift by those "serious" jazz listeners and shrugged off as not really being jazz. Maybe this "serious" part of many jazz fans' attitude is the main problem of it all? Food for thought ...?

Of course there are different ways to enjoy jazz for oneself. I still get lots of enjoyment out of putting on a platter of West Coast Cool (or Cohn/Sims et al. Eastern cool too, for that matter) when lazing late at night in my lounge chair or being sprawled outside in my garden easy chair, some ice cream and a cool drink and a good book or mag on hand. This IS immensely (jazz-infused) cool to me. BUT that's only me ... and not something for everybody. Just like with those who enjoy other forms of jazz for themselves, including the intenseness of Avantgarde etc. Perfectly fine on a personal level. But not something you can expect to find a wider audience that finds THIS "cool" on a more permanent basis. Not to mention the fact that "jazz" has come to encompass a very, very wide spectrum of styles that hardly anybody can be expected to appreciate to the same degree throughout.

Honestly ... as far as I can see the only time this "cool" thing happened in the past 20-25 years was when neo-swing came up (and then up again). But see how all this was blasted by "core" ("serious") jazz fans from Day One. There were good and bad acts at all times (like with any music), but if you could mix jazz and funk etc. into fusion in the 70s, for example, why not mix jazz and punk into neo-swing in the 90s? (Not my favorite kind of bands in that style, BTW, but their crossover approach had something quite legitimate (disclaimer: word used NOT in the "classical music" sense here!) going for it.)

Maybe many among the jazz "core" audience (at least many of those who've been into jazz for along time) are their own worst enemies when it comes to turning jazz into being cool again?

 

Edited September 27, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

YEAH!!!!!

MG

[clifford_thornton]

Bummer of an article despite the beautiful photos.

I like new music.

[Big Beat Steve]

Nothing against that. There's room and place for every taste. But you cannot FORCE people into what they are SUPPOSED to find cool. If you want to win them over you have to realize that one of the best ways is to EASE them into the music and let them find ways to open up their ears so they can gradually find their own way into jazz. Maybe not into the sub-segment of jazz your (or I) prefer but another one that THEY prefer.

As for the article being a "bummer", doesn't it describe the situation as it is (not everywher, probably, but to a large extent)? So don't shoot the messenger ...

 

 

 

[JSngry]

I don't want to win anybody over or ease anybody into anything. People either get it or they don't. All I hope for is a fair visibility for all of what is being done, after which, hey, see you there if you're there, see you someplace else if you're not.

I go to a lot of places, so the odds are good that there will be an opportunity for intersection somewhere. But if not, oh well, life is short, and I'm frequently flatulent. Count your blessings!

[Teasing the Korean]

On September 26, 2016 at 4:50 PM, GA Russell said:

...maybe it's because not even jazz fans are particularly interested in what today's jazz musicians are doing.

History tends to favor the originators, doesn't it?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Big Beat Steve’s post yesterday was an excellent debunking of this general proposition. What people mean by a question like that  – not just those kinds of people who write silly articles or make silly documentaries for news media, but everyone in their everyday speech – is ‘when did the kind of people I know about and care about, professionally or personally, stop thinking jazz was cool?’

But there’s NO kind of music that commands unanimous support throughout America. None even command MAJORITY support, not even pop music. In the period 1955-2001, according to Joel Whitburn’s book ‘Top pop albums 1955-2001’, which uses RIAA certified sales figures, only five albums sold more than twenty million in the USA. Here they are:

Eagles – Greatest hits (27m)

Michael Jackson – Thriller (26)

Pink Floyd – The wall (23)

Led Zeppelin – 4 (22)

Billy Joel – Greatest hits (21)

 

Far more common (77 in the period) are albums that sold between 10 and 19 million.

But even the biggest selling albums – even if each was bought by a different person, which is doubtful (my daughter trashed her first copy of ‘Thriller’ and had to get another) – aren’t bought by a very large proportion of the US population, even if you divide the population by four to get the rough number of families. So ALL forms or music are a minority taste.

And jazz is just one of those minority tastes, perhaps a bit bigger in terms of the charts than C&W. In the period covered by Whitburn’s book, there are over 2400 jazz or jazzish (it’s hard to separate out, say, the James Brown albums that have no jazz content whatever) albums in there, so I’m not expecting many to agree with that number. But it’s not peanuts, folks.

The number of hit jazz records has been declining since the middle forties. Before that time, jazz records seem to have formed the majority of popular records since some time in the 1920s. So one answer to the question might be, since the end of WWII.

But most people wouldn’t say THAT was what the question was about, and of course, they’d be right. So I’ve looked at the numbers in the 1980s and in the period 1990-2001. During the 1980s, I’ve got 388 jazz albums in the list, in the nineties, 269.

And yes, a LOT of the jazz albums are what’s called ‘smooth jazz’. But still, there’s a lot of stuff no one in their right mind would call non-jazz: in the nineties, Pat Metheny had 7 hits; Grover Washington Jr and Miles Davis had 4; George Duke, Joe Sample and Nat ‘King’ Cole, all had 3; Bob James, Cassandra Wilson, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Us 3, and Wynton Marsalis all had 2. Billie Holiday, Branford Marsalis, Doc Severinson, Gil Scott-Heron, Jazz Crusaders, John Coltrane, Lonnie Liston Smith, Ray Charles and Roy Ayers, to mention a handful, all had hits, too.

So jazz IS commanding a smaller audience. Well, some of us are dying, I guess. But guys like Kenny G, Dave Sanborn, George Howard and Gerald Albright don’t seem to have had too bad an income from jazz that lots of people actually thought was really cool (albeit that lots of people who think of themselves as ‘real’ jazz fans think it sucks or ain’t even jazz).

And note, Big Jay McNeely, not the most creative of jazz musicians, is STILL making a good living, honking his brains out all over Europe.

And I do agree with Jim Sangrey; why should he WANT to bring something to the people, any more than they should be made to WANT to listen to him? We've all got different rules we live our lives by and I reckon that's GOOD.

MG