Too Many Solos

Jazz at Lincoln Center recently released its program for the upcoming season. It lists 11 repertory performances–the inevitable Miles Davis and several devoted to Mary Lou Williams among them–and 11 musicians’ showcases. Of these, one is a premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ new work, and six pair younger musicians like Cyrus Chestnut and Benny Green, who will be putting on what should be a great series in January. The average age of the musicians featured in the other five shows is 72.

JALC exemplifies an institutional devotion to living tradition, craft and discipline; it is run by some of the very finest and most knowledgable people the music has to offer, and their reverence for masters like Steve Lacy and Ahmad Jamal cannot be held against them. But what does it mean for audiences when a quarter of the spots in the most influential jazz series are held for people who started recording in the 1950s, and another half are held for the dead? Moreover, what does it mean for jazz in the city?

"It’s not at all a bad time for jazz in New York," says cultural critic Nat Hentoff. "The worst time was when rock took over in the 60s. Even then, I remember Teddy Wilson telling me, ‘If they have a musical ear, they’ll come to jazz.’"

Did they, though? From the 1960s until very recently, jazz appealed primarily to obscurantists and nostalgics. The latter, now as then, are the ones who ultimately pay the bills of musicians and small promoters; they just want to do something romantic and have a vague notion that jazz goes with red wine and dim lighting. They own copies of a few standard albums, go to whichever club is near at hand, and enjoy themselves. The former, the feverish and slightly pale fellows sitting in the far corner of the club scoffing to one another or furrowing through the racks at the record store with a rubber-banded stack of documents pertaining to their collections, were for a time the preferred audience.

That is no longer the case.

There are, simply, fewer of them. If you think of the jazz scene in New York as it would be depicted on a thermographic map, the bright red spot is Lincoln Center; the further from it, the paler and bluer a place. These colder spots are where most musicians make their living. It’s not an easy thing to quantify, but I would guess the number of hardcore jazz listeners in New York–people who weekly go to the smaller and midsized clubs and regularly buy records by living musicians–can’t be much higher than 1000. I asked staffers at several clubs and got guesses as low as 400.

Take another instance. The entirety of the priceless Prestige and Riverside catalogues, which include arguably the best work of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins and recordings by virtually every important jazz musician working in the 1950s, can be downloaded essentially for free at emusic.com. Had the technology existed to do this even 15 years ago, it seems doubtful that an expensive box set like the eight-disc "Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces" would have been simply given away. But the people who pay for these sorts of things are a limited market, all of whom already have Monk’s complete Riverside recordings. They are being given away because a younger generation of obsessive aficionados hasn’t come up. If the sorts of record collectors who buy $150 box sets have disappeared, and the hardcore club-going audience could all fit into Alice Tully Hall, who’s sitting elbow-to-elbow with the Parisian tourist at the club on a Friday night? A new kind of casual fan: the culture-seeker.

Go into any club where jazz is played and you’ll likely find yourself surrounded by people who are nostalgic for something they’ve never known. They applaud after every solo, and how a group reacts to such a crowd tells a lot about them. Some get discouraged and lock themselves into head-solos-head, letting even the drummer take his chorus every song of every set; some batter out purposefully clattering notes, sneering that no one notices; some do what they wish and just play, somewhat deadened. None of them, no matter what they do, can much affect their situation. They’ve been turned into living museum exhibitions, like the women who churn butter in preservationist towns in central Pennsylvania.

It’s hard not to trace this development to the victory of Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch and the rest of the figures behind JALC. Their goal has never been, as fusty and fusion-loving critics have contended, to trap jazz in a box and thrust it back into some dimly imagined past, or to stuff musicians like dioramas and slap them down on a stage. It has been to instigate a living tradition of innovation through assimilation of the past. Part of that is the act of evaluating the past, deciding what has held up and what is worthy of emulation; that is why we have a pair of Mary Lou Williams tributes and a Steve Lacy concert to look forward to. The new JALC space at Columbus Circle, the widespread celebration of the Louis Armstrong centennial and the success of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on jazz all testify to the success of this project, as does the subjective sense one gets that the casual fan’s idea of jazz has come over the last few years to greatly resemble Crouch and Marsalis’ vision.

The overawed and deferential crowds at the clubs testify to that success as well. They understand the idea of trumpeter as Promethean hero, but not what comes after. They understand the idea of jazz as tradition–a friend of mine who worked in Tower’s jazz department for a summer guesses that 80 percent of their sales is catalogue–but not as living tradition, and perhaps not as dead tradition either, if the Prestige catalogue can be given away practically for free. They understand Duke Ellington’s place in the vision they’ve been sold. They don’t, as yet, seem to understand Jason Moran’s.

It is hard not to be discouraged by this. One doesn’t want crowds for whom jazz is something that happened when men wore wider-shouldered suits and women’s skirts flared from the hips. Much of this is the failure of the record companies to capitalize on the influence of the traditionalist project by properly promoting to a popular audience younger players like Moran who bend tradition to contemporary use. There is instead a bizarre focus on photogenic warblers like Diana Krall and Norah Jones. As Hentoff says, "Popularity isn’t the criterion for the survival of jazz. As long as you have just enough gigs, the music will survive." True enough. But it isn’t a lack of popularity that’s the problem right now so much as a lack of discrimination, an idea of hero worship and the melting away of the hardcore audience that keeps musicians honest as they learn their craft in the smaller clubs. If you love jazz, or simply think you might one day want to, the best thing you can do is go to the club and hoot down that fifth drum solo in an hour-long set. Nudge your neighbor at the next table and make sure he does the same.