Jazz Ain't Dead, But Charlie Parker Is -- So Let’s Move On, Shall We?

By Will Layman, 29 June 2010
Writer and jazz critic Paul da Barros asks an essential question about jazz in the new century. “How can the music can get back into the culture in a meaningful way?”

If jazz cannot answer that question, then it is doomed to obscurity. Without a hook into how life is lived today, jazz will be museum music, the taste of a small minority of fanatics. No matter how many Clifford Brown solos these fans can scat from memory, their support alone can’t nurture a living art. For many, this threshold was crossed long ago.

Once, We Were Popular
Jazz started off as popular music, music that came from and directly served folks. Ragtime had its own dance, the Cake Walk. Early jazz in New Orleans was social music—played in brothels and speakeasies, in funeral parades and at celebrations. The rise of the big bands and the blossoming of “swing” made jazz the pop music of the ‘30s and ‘40s—in dancehalls, in radio broadcasts, and in the hearts of millions of jitterbugging teens… and their parents. Yes, there was a time when Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey were as big as Madonna or Jay-Z.

The ‘50s brought us rock ‘n’ roll, but not the death of jazz’s popular connection. Elvis Presley may have been bigger, but everyone still knew who Miles Davis was. As The Beatles came to dominate radio, jazz still thrived on jukeboxes and even on the charts—Ramsey Lewis’ “The In Crowd” was funky piano that went to number five on the pop charts in 1965. Jazz managed to absorb the influence of rock and soul without losing its essence, and plenty of rock musicians found themselves playing Coltrane tunes or, at least, playing his tunes the way they thought Coltrane would have.

Somewhere around 1980 or so, however, the connection of any real jazz to the popular pulse becomes problematic. “Smooth jazz” became temporarily popular, but it’s not really jazz. Hip hop used a few notable jazz samples to create hits (US3’s “Cantaloop” in 1993), but the jazz music had become mostly just something to play in the background. A few jazz vocalists, such as the 70-plus Tony Bennett in the ‘90s and the sultry Diana Krall in the last decade made popular inroads, but they did so with music that might best be called “nostalgic”: that is, compositions, style and affect straight out of 1960. The mass success of Norah Jones was no more jazz than, say, Carole King’s Tapestry.

So, What Is Jazz Today?
Ask the average person to name a jazz musician today. My informal poll reveals that the most likely answer is Miles Davis (died 1991), an answer that might have been given 55 years ago. Other common answers: Louis Armstrong (died 1971), Dizzy Gillespie (died 1993), Duke Ellington (died 1974), and Wynton Marsalis (at last, an actual living human being).
Complete on  >  http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/126714-to-find-the-way-you-must-leave-the-way