Long before we debated what real punk-rock was, what true hip-hop was, or what made indie-rock authentic, jazz heads grappled with what is and isn’t jazz music. Now, the debate is whether jazz is dying off or not.
America’s jazz audience is not only shrinking, it’s aging. Attendance at jazz performances has dropped 30% since 2002. The median age of concert patrons in 2008 was 46; in 1982 it was 29.
But jazz is not dead, yet. Among other groups, Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet is proof:
The full blog post, on the status of Jazz in 2009, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
A series of recent live music performances at London’s Southbank Centre by–or inspired by–Ornette Coleman, a free jazz legend, was equal parts amazing, exhausting and surprising. Never dull.
Having never seen Coleman perform live before, two things became clear to me by the end of the week: his playing oozes with the blues, and he doesn’t want to alienate his audience, no matter much his avant-garde approach to music might suggest otherwise. His music may seem challenging or inaccessible, but the invitation to participate is always there.
It’s one thing to listen to scratchy old recordings of your favorite jazz artist, but seeing filmed live footage of greats like Ella Fitzgerald or Clifford Brown ripping it is a completely different kind of treat for the real fan.
For the devotee, it’s all in the details: Until I saw late ’50s television footage of Dizzy Gillespie playing, I had no idea that the cheeks he was so famous for puffing out while playing could sometimes push his black, horn-rimmed glasses slightly out of position on his face. Until watching footage of Miles Davis playing “So What” with the Gil Evans orchestra, I didn’t know that Davis would often lick the inside of his mouthpiece before putting the horn to his mouth for a solo.
The full blog post, on London’s Jazz in June festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.
So why Coleman? Lots of reasons. Coleman is one of the founders of the “free jazz” genre (he prefers the term “Harmolodics”). He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music. Jazz at Lincoln Center has given Coleman his due props, and he’s got a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.
Compared to more mainstream, conservative ideas of what jazz is or should be, Coleman’s raw, abstract approach to jazz was always controversial — one fellow musician reportedly assaulted him after a show -– but his stamp on jazz is unmistakable and undeniable.
“Throughout his entire career, Ornette has always maintained that music is music,” Glenn Max, the producer of contemporary culture for Southbank, explained. “It’s not jazz, or rock, or classical. It’s just music. In an era too often typified by the slavish aping of trends, these are qualities that are increasingly rare.”
I’ve seen jazz pianist Michael Garrick referred to as the “British Ellington,” but the fluid, graceful, and exploratory way he played those keys at a recent London gig reminded me more of Bill Evans, mixed with the playfulness of Thelonious Monk. At one point he reached inside the opened piano and played by plucking at strings. He’d laugh or shout out when a band member did something he liked. And he seemed to enjoy choosing precisely how to end each piano solo as he did starting each one up.
This particular show was an inauspicious affair. Garrick’s quartet was situated on a small stage in the back room of a pub in a sleepy, southwest nook of London just over the Barnes Bridge. There to see Garrick were about six people.
