Why we must fight to keep jazz alive

Digby Fairweather, a renowned British jazz writer and musician, says it is time to fight for the great music of jazz.

By Digby Fairweather

8:00AM BST 20 Sep 2012

It was back in l961 that an author called Henry Pleasants wrote a book about jazz called Death of a Music. At that point in 20th-century culture he could have been forgiven for undue pessimism because jazz, more than half a century ago, was still regularly hailed as America’s principal contribution to world culture. Had Pleasants owned a crystal ball, however, he might have shocked himself with his prescience.

Within two years, the arrival of the Beatles and the rock revolution - probably the most stunning of its kind ever to transform popular culture – would send jazz skidding helplessly into a cultural siding from which it has never since emerged.

And yet – somehow, stranded within that artistic siding – the music has survived until now; not with honours but with a display of durability that has consistently defied and survived the suffocating blanket of the popular music industry. Killing a self-expressive art form is probably a contradiction in terms (at least as long as humanity survives). But you can lock it away in a cultural fortress from which even its most vivid and cogent statements won't be heard. And that is what has happened – and, by and large, is happening still - to jazz.

It would be as needlessly destructive to suggest that what happened constituted an act of deliberate suppression as it would be naïve to suggest that it was completely accidental. But in order to understand what’s gone on in the music’s cultural demotion it’s necessary – however briefly - to re-wind 50 years of what now is popular music history.

It began as the sun rose on the 60s, when the stale winds of Tin Pan Alley’s commercial fare were blown away by fresh breezes from the Mersey. Until then - despite the emergence of Elvis Presley and his contemporaries – pop music had never set up serious challenges to the intellectual and musical superiority of jazz which, for the majority of young musical people, remained the dominant youth culture. The new arrivals from Liverpool – whose emergence, highly significantly, coincided with the progression of the baby-boom generation into young adulthood – were in a strong position to make the changes they did. Not only did they redefine the parameters of popular music but retained – like Presley - the seductive image of the minstrel serenading his lover to the accompaniment of his guitar.
Read full article on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/9548694/Why-we-must-fight-to-keep-jazz-alive.html