Why jazz musicians are making jazz audiences louder....

by Minim Pro

A couple of articles by eminent jazz bloggers Sebastian Scotney of LondonJazz and Peter Hum of Jazzblog.ca have recently been covering a debate in French jazz concerning the role of the parisian jazz club Duc des Lombards after the club and its programming were criticised by pianist Lauren Coq on his blog Le Revolution de Jazzmin.

One thing that particularly caught my eye was Sebastian Scotney quoting Coq's letter to club programmer Sebastien Vidal:

"Wasn't it reported to me that Brian Blade started weeping quietly on the stage after having asked the people in the front row - in vain - to eat more discreetly?"

When I read this, I have to admit my initial reaction was amazement, but then it occurred to me that famous musicians like Brian Blade exist in a totally different musical world to people like me.

As a grassroots jazz musician, the number of gigs I've done in my entire career in front of a completely silent audience can probably be counted in single figures. Like many jazz musicians, the overwhelming majority of my gigs take place against a background crowd noise and general aural detritus. Even when we are fortunate enough to play festivals or jazz clubs, there is still a pretty high level of background noise and it's something that the modern grassroots player just has to get used to.

Of course, when you're Brian Blade, a particularly noisy crowd is something that you don't have to deal with as an everyday occurrence. This is probably the reason that many musicians also find Keith Jarrett's hissy fits brought on by audience distractions ridiculous - because most of them would gladly lose a limb to be able to play regularly in front of audiences as quiet as these musicians normally experience.

Perhaps Brian and Keith should take solace in the fact that at least they don't get told to stop playing in the middle of a tune so the Bride and Groom can cut the cake!

However, this post is not a whine about how badly the majority of jazz musicians are treated, nor is it to moan about an 'us and them' situation regarding grassroots players and the big names. After all, Messrs Blade and Jarrett are big names for a good reason - they're incredible players and deserve to be listened to and appreciated. In fact, a while ago I wrote this article suggesting that perhaps we could be more like Keith Jarrett in our attitude to audiences.

Instead, I wanted to draw attention to the idea of how the ever-increasing volume of noise on gigs affects the music that is produced. As a pianist myself, the opportunities to play beautifully restrained, Jarrett-style ballads on gigs are almost unheard of. There is just too much noise and the music gets overpowered. For this reason, on an average grassroots gig, most musicians stick to a safe mix of swing and latin tunes and any ballads are often played at a more of a slow swing tempo than with an out-and-out ballad feel.

Nevertheless, crowd noise has been a feature of jazz music since day one. It seems pretty unlikely that rent parties consisted of people sipping tea and listening in awed silence to Fats Waller. However, it occurred to me recently that the ubiquity of amplification on modern jazz gigs has caused a significant change in the amount of noise in a room when a band is playing.

It's almost unheard of these days, regardless of venue size, to hear a bass player playing unamplified on a gig. A personal theory is that this is due, in part, to the advent of the amplified digital piano. On a gig, today's pianists will most likely be playing stage pianos at louder volumes than the acoustic upright pianos that used to feature in jazz clubs and venues.

As a result, the bass player now has to amplify his bass or it simply won't be heard. The extra volume available to these instruments also means that drummers can play louder and more forcefully than in previous eras and the result is that the average rhythm section is probably louder now than at any time in history.

Once, the overall volume of a band was dictated by the volume of the quietest instrument, but the introduction and continued development of amplification technology has removed that restriction. Today, it is not uncommon to go to a small jazz club and listen to a band where even the horns are mic'd up. It's pretty clear that if saxes and trumpets are now requiring amplification, things are getting louder.

This increase in volume is probably a result of several factors including the desire to overcome crowd noise and the increase in the general volume of live music brought about by the overdriven guitar sounds of rock music.

Unfortunately, by turning up the amps to overcome the crowd noise, it's quite possible that we've simply made the crowds more noisy. At one time, a jazz-club audience could murmur to each other whilst the band was playing and still be heard; today they probably have to shout if they're near the stage when the music is in full flow. Listening to old recordings, it's clear that crowd chatter has always been something that jazz musicians have had to deal with, but it's only in recent years that we have had the option to do something about it by turning up the music to drown it out.

So now we have the technology to turn our instruments up to drown out the crowd - but this only works when we're actually playing. Unfortunately as the music gets louder, so does the crowd noise and as soon as we lay out, or simply leave some space in the music, the roar of the crowd becomes incredibly obvious and incredibly intrusive.

I personally believe that this general increase in the volume of gigs has contributed to the phenomenon ofoverplaying, which I consider to be one of the most detrimental aspects to both the quality and the popularity of modern jazz. A while back, I wrote a series of posts about overplayingdesigned to help the improving musician counter this problem. These posts emphasised factors such as insecurity, the need to impress and the emphasis on technical facility in practice as contributing causes to overplaying, but I now also suspect that the background noise on the average gig can be a factor.

Because there is so much crowd noise on the average grassroots gig, as soon as a musician leaves some space he is instantly aware of the noise of the crowd and in extreme circumstances it's hard for him even to hear the other instruments. As a result, he feels less able to sit on a groove, is less confident that the groove is enough and so leaves fewer and fewer spaces in his playing. Soon this becomes his default way of playing: even if he does make it to the big leagues and gets to play in quieter situations, playing almost constantly is now so much a part of his playing that it's an impossible habit to shake.

Why is the crowd so loud? Because the music is so loud. Why is the music so loud? Because the crowd is so loud. It seems we have a vicious circle on our hands here - and I'm not sure if it's doing the music itself any favours.