How many times have you heard that jazz is dead? Jazz is very definitely not dead, but just as definitely, it seems to be in limbo. Here is a quick and dirty history.
Ragtime began in the 1890s. Some claim ragtime is not really jazz. Around the turn of the 20th century, along came music out of New Orleans called jazz (or jass). By 1920, America had entered ‘The Jazz Age’. Another style emerged in New York: this wasn’t yet labelled ‘swing’, but it was on its way.
Big band swing dominated the 1930s and early 1940s. Within these big bands were small groups such as the Benny Goodman Trio, Quartet, Sextet; and Count Basie’s Kansas City 6. Other small groups were led by Fats Waller, Bud Freeman and John Kirby.
Bebop, cool, and the birth of modern jazz
In the late 1930s, some swing musicians began to develop a new style that was more technically challenging and less formulaic. By the mid-1940s, this style had become known as bebop. Bebop existed side by side with another style called jump – a very simplified, blues-based swing music. Hipsters bopped and Lindy Hoppers jumped.
Be had barely bopped when a small group of beboppers gave birth to the ‘cool’ genre. Other beboppers decided that bop needed less technical wizardry and more soul – simplified a bit with more emphasis on the blues. This was labelled hard bop or soul jazz.
At the same time, ‘Afro-Cuban’ became popular. Actually, Latin elements had been part of jazz since the beginning. In WC Handy’s St Louis Blues from 1914, there is a strain played in tango rhythm. The mambo craze surfaced in the 1950s, along with salsa and the cha-cha-cha. Brazil gave us a samba style called bossa nova.
In the mid/late 50s, a few musicians were taking jazz ‘out’, working on a style that would go under various names: Avant-Garde, the New Thing, but usually free jazz. At the same time, some jazz musicians began to use an approach based on modes – Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme are modal jazz. Yet another branch emerged under the name ‘Third Stream’, a mixture of jazz and classical music.
Fusion and the quest for commercial appeal
By the late 60s, some musicians and record producers went for a more commercial jazz style that mixed in rock and/or R&B elements branded ‘fusion’. (Jazz has always been fusion.) In the 70s, a very easy and innocuous form of fusion came along called smooth jazz. New Age was a sort of elevator music to help the listener stay calm and relaxed. Most ‘hip’ jazz buffs ignored both.
For eight decades, jazz had created something new every 10 to 15 years, but in the 1980s there was a giant leap backwards. Musicians who came on the scene were doing 1960s modal, 1940s swing, and even the New Orleans jazz of the early 1990s. Others tried to fuse jazz with hip-hop.
The 1980s – a step backwards?
Since the 1980s, jazz has been all over the place. Lots of excellent musicians have come along and are now considered ‘jazz masters’. But nothing has emerged that could be called a new style such as trad, swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, modal, free jazz, or fusion. It seems that jazz is stuck in a time warp.
Even as this sentence is being written, there is plenty of good jazz out there. But there is no new jazz. And there hasn’t been any new jazz for a long time. Even the jazz-hip-hop fusion has been trying to gain a foothold for over three decades.
‘New’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’ or ‘good’. Smooth jazz was new four decades ago, but it didn’t make anyone stand up and holler, “Hallelujah, this is the jazz innovation we’ve been waiting for! Kenny G is the new John Coltrane”.
Why has jazz been in a holding pattern for over 40 years now? To answer this question we must creep down to the basement and pry open up the dusty locked box that contains jazz’s dirty little secret.
The locked box – jazz’s hidden secret
Before we take a peek inside the box, note that jazz is a niche market – it accounts for only about 1% of total music sales in the US. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, the best-selling jazz album of all time, has moved five million units in 60 years. Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department sold 1.4 million units on day one.
Everyone agrees that jazz was created by African Americans. Everyone agrees that most, but by no means all, of the greatest jazz musicians have been (and still are) black. But … time to pry open that locked box … Since the 1950s (and maybe even before then) the majority of jazz fans have been white. (The Jazz Arts Group in Ohio created the ongoing Jazz Audience Initiative. In its latest survey, it found that only 17% of jazz audiences were under 45, and 80% were white and predominantly male).
Back in the 1940s, bebop and the much more popular jump band music coexisted. Right about then, black folks began drifting away from jazz. In the 1950s, when Dave Brubeck started performing in colleges, most of the students were white. And those white students are now in their 70s and 80s. They cannot dig hip-hop, but most can dig Wynton Marsalis. He plays the kind of jazz they love. The same goes for many of the jazz musicians who have come onto the scene since the 1980s.
In 2003, I attended a gig by Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The concert title was For Dancers Only: swing music from the 1930s and 40s. Most of the folks were white, but the guy next to me was black and he loved Wynton. He was well into his 70s. The music took him back to his youth when he would Lindy Hop and give his girl a twirl.
The race issue has been with jazz since there was jazz. I am not qualified to make any contribution to that discussion. I go along with trumpeter Clark Terry’s statement: “A note doesn’t care who plays it.” My point is as much about age as it is about race. Jazz has become music mostly for old white geezers. And jazz is sittin’ here in limbo.
If you would like more details, you might check out my book Noble Sounds: A Simple Guide to Jazz and Blues.
