On the 1968 masterpiece album "Congliptious" by the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell there is an amazing piece of improvised music called "Jazz Death."  "Jazz Death" is a fairly lengthy unaccompanied trumpet solo by Lester Bowie which is bracketed by two short bits of spoken word theatre. Someone (I always assumed it was Roscoe Mitchell) plays the role of a jazz journalist. The piece opens with the “journalist” interviewing Mr. Bowie. He asks Bowie, “Is jazz as we know it dead?” Bowie then plays a 6 or 7 minute unaccompanied solo consisting of the most magnificent resume of all possible sounds that can be made by a human being and a trumpet. At the conclusion of this freakishly marvelous solo Bowie concludes the theatre by saying, “So you see, it all depends on what you know.”

What he said.

I think the problem is that in the late '80s corporate interests took over jazz. They promoted a certain group of artists (so called Young Lions- now increasingly Gray Panthers) and they marketed a certain image and branding of what jazz is and what it isn't. In order to market something you have to brand it and define it. That is not something that was ever part of the jazz ethos before Wynton and his cohort hit the scene. 

I started playing jazz in about 1967 as a young teenager. Back then nobody told us what was cool-except Downbeat...and everyone took even their opinion with a grain of salt. We played all kinds of jazz and proudly called it jazz: free jazz, hard bop, modal, funk, fusion, soul jazz…call it what you want to. The music was alive and it was improvised. It was happening…right then. We didn’t worship our elders. We respected them and learned from them and kept our eyes to the front. I was a 20 something working professional before I really heard swing era music and I was an almost 30 year old grad student before I really checked out early jazz. I think I was typical for American jazz musicians of my generation, regardless of race.

I guess I'm just old enough to remember jazz before the corporate take over of the music and its commoditization. The music had to be confined to be defined and it had to be defined to be marketed. It had to be canonized to be institutionalized and fit the mold of Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institution (a MUSEUM!) and most educational institutions. This led to the exclusion of certain music and musicians from the world of jazz and revocation of their membership cards. It led to elevation of some canonized musicians beyond the level of esteem I personally feel they deserve (such as Armstrong or Ellington-your mileage may vary).

The corporate imposed and institutionally supported definition of jazz built a wall around the music...even going so far as to revise history and exclude or marginalize certain things from the canon of jazz that had been virtually mainstream when they were created...things like free music, funk, fusion, etc. For example, Miles in the ‘70s (with amazing JAZZ musicians like Dave Liebman, Sonny Fortune, Gary Bartz, Al Foster…) was very powerful and influential among young musicians and music lovers. Today “jazz” people talk about that period of his music like he had moved to Mars and set up shop. Go look for these musics –any music outside the superimposed canon of jazz- in the Ken Burns series. For that matter, go look for white musicians or European musicians or musicians making music anywhere except New Orleans or New York (and only certain New York cliques during certain decades). I know that my Indianapolis-based elders, friends and colleagues find it hard to believe that you can do a video series on the history of jazz with out mentioning Indy’s illustrious native sons, not even J.J. Johnson, Wes Montgomery or Freddie Hubbard.

In the wild the music would continue to morph and grow, so we need to hold it captive. That funny smell of something dying is the smell of music held captive by certain people's definitions. Many say the music that has been defined and marketed as "JAZZ" for the last 30 years is not cool. I would agree. However, there is vital and relevant artistic music that in 1965 would have been called jazz or is a direct evolution from the jazz of 1965. Unfortunately, most of that vital and still "cool" music falls outside the rubric imposed on jazz by corporations and institutions.

A few years ago the International Association for Jazz Education met its demise when it was infiltrated by corporate money from entities such as BET, record companies, music industry players, etc. The mission of the organization was subverted by these corporate influences; education and creative music became a footnote and audience development and market share became the focus. While I am presently a member of organizations such as JEN and ITG, I am skeptical of their ability to remain incorrupt by the influence of corporations and corporate money.

Many musicians that are playing brilliant music that I would consider jazz have relabeled their music to avoid the creative strictures and audience/market limitations that today are inevitably tied to the term “jazz.” In my youth my favorite music was “free jazz.” Today jazz audiences by and large diminish this approach to music making and marginalize all but a few legends of this music (and how many current “jazz lovers” actually listen to Ornette or Cecil?). Many creative free improvisers now run from the label “jazz” and find an appreciative niche audience by promoting their work as “improvised music.”

Institutional jazz seems hell bent on canonizing the historical greats of jazz and focusing on the music as an historical event. It is very hard to drive forward if you keep your eyes obsessively on the rearview mirror. I was raised to believe (as Kenny Werner has said) that innovation and personalization was the jazz tradition. Not slavish imitation of dead cats. Michel Foucault opines that canonization is an act of violence on history. To me it seems that things like Essentially Ellington are acts of violence on jazz.

If all of this seems weird coming from someone who was a collegiate jazz educator for almost four decades, I guess what I am saying is, don’t let corporations and institutions tell you what is and isn’t jazz music. 

Nobody may read this and it may be too "heavy" for this forum, but I wrote this on Facebook almost a decade ago and was revisiting it. Everything I mention was amplified during the pandemic. From 2016...

"A video has recently been circulating on social media that inspired me to write. The video (from BuzzFeed UK News) was an excerpt from an interview with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney where they express upset at the decline in live music venues. Links to the video can be found on the BuzzFeed UK News facebook page. My thoughts here will be familiar to many of my students, who good naturedly tolerate my “rants” about music, culture, education, social issues and their intersections. I would love input from across a variety of disciplines-not only musicians (from a variety of genres), but educators, social scientists, historians, economists, chefs, literature and humanities creators and scholars-in hope of generating significant discussion in the comment thread. I sense many larger connections to societal trends (in a sense that Toffler or Gladwell might relish). I’ll focus most of my discussion on jazz and other music of American and pan-African diaspora origin, as that is what I know best. It shouldn’t be a leap to find parallel developments in other musical traditions or in literature, theater, visual arts, etc. I will, by definition, be US-centric. I will therefore, relish input from those who have made a life and career in other arts, other scholarly disciplines, other parts of the world. So...

What is music?

That is an existential question of epic proportion. I think that we are experiencing a fundamental shift in the very definition of music and the role it plays in modern society. This is driven largely by changes in technology and resultant shifts in our sociology and economy. It has happened before. The change from the patronage system in Europe, the rise of the concert hall, etc. is one example. In every case there were contemporary shifts in technology that brought about drastic changes across the culture and economy. The present situation might be seen narrowly as the demise of live performance venues, or the rise of streaming digital music and illegal downloading, or any number of small trends. These smaller trends are symptomatic of a much greater fundamental shift. What are the root causes? Can we anticipate other related developments and maximize the benefits of such a seachange while mitigating loss?

Music has traditionally been about people sharing physical space and musicians made the air in that space move and vibrate in magical ways.

Originally, music had practical social functions. It fulfilled a purpose in the culture. Music could be associated with ritual and tradition (often sacred), worship, fertility rituals, mourning, celebration. The classic example from early jazz is the New Orleans funeral. Music could be story telling, including the pan-African griot tradition of preserving and conveying history, values and the cultural code via song, poetry and legend. It could entertain and communicate emotion. Music was made by the community for the community...what Toffler called “prosumers”, produced by all and consumed by all. Everyone participates in art in the pre-industrial world. In the pre-industrial setting, art is not “ART with a capital A.” It is craft. The artisan makes things (including music) that fulfill a function and those products are made with excellence, craftsmanship and they are the manifestation of relationships within the community and with higher powers. Bach didn’t write his sacred music for a concert setting. He wrote that music for worship. When we play the St. Matthew Passion in a concert hall we have, to a degree, committed violence on the music. This is no more or less true than Armstrong playing When the Saints Go Marching In outside the context of a funeral or Jimi Hendrix’s approach to the Star Spangled Banner...sacrilege to a certain degree. Recontextualization changes the meaning of a work and alters the message and intent of the artist.

Over time and with the diaspora of jazz from the region of its origin, cultural and economic changes caused the music to become predominantly entertainment. Through the 1920s, ‘30s and into the ‘40s jazz was entertainment music...primarily for the support of theater or for popular dancing. This eventually included not only live performance, but the new electronic media: phonographs, radio, motion pictures with sound, jukeboxes… It was decreasingly about ritual and increasingly functioned as entertainment. It also became more of a market based commodity. In the finest industrial revolution fashion, creators and performers were different from the technicians who did the recording, the packaging, those who marketed the commodity, others who oversaw and reaped the majority of financial benefit.

During and after World War II, the economic wheels fell off this business model for jazz as popular entertainment for a variety of reasons including substance rationing, impacts of conscription (both related to the war effort), the American Federation of Musicians recording bans (especially the 1942 ban), etc. Jazz-especially instrumental jazz-began to wane as popular music and increasingly became ART-and I mean “high art”-where people sat and listened. It became divorced from cultural function and became “art for art’s sake.” It became more complex, no longer having to support popular dancing or the simple melodies and lyrics of popular tunes. This was the so called “Bebop Era”-the beginning of “Modern Jazz.”

But it was still primarily about people sharing physical space while the musicians made the air in that space move in magical ways.

In the past, even recorded music was part of a social experience. There was usually only one radio in a typical home in the early days of broadcast media, one TV in the typical home in the 1960s, etc. When I was a teenaged musician in the early 1970s we would regularly get together with friends and listen to records. One friend would bring a recording of Harry Partch, Steve Reich or Varese he had just purchased. I’d have a Blue Note recording of Don Cherry, Miles Davis or The Jazz Messengers. Several of us would hang out and share the experience of listening to these recordings. Repeatedly. And again. My friends and cohort spent literally hundreds-if not thousands-of hours digging recordings together throughout the ‘70s. It was a central part of growing up as a young musician. Certainly, as aspiring musicians we would go home and privately delve further into the sounds we had shared, playing along, learning by ear, perhaps transcribing, generally making the sound of that music part of our core being. But we did these acts of creative solitude in order to prepare to re-engage the world by making the air move magically in spaces we would share with other musicians and future audiences.

Today listening to music is most often a solitary affair. Rather than being a shared experience, music is pumped into each individual’s ears via headphones or earbuds. I had headphones when I was young, but I used them when I wanted to listen without disturbing my family or roommates, or for better fidelity when I was trying to transcribe inner parts or bass lines. It certainly wasn’t the norm to listen in sequester from others. Today it is. I am as guilty as the next, often spending three or four hours a day with my earbuds in. The majority of music consumption today is done passively and in isolation. The shared experience is not as valued, whether live or via recording. This is a profound change that I do not see discussed enough. I think the implications are huge, and I’m sure I have not scratched the surface of this in my own ruminations.

Again, I know there are parallels across our culture. Theater was a live experience until film came along. Then everyone went to the theater to watch movies. Then the family gathered in the living room to watch the television. Today everyone watches individually selected programming in isolation on their own screens. From the theater to Netflix is another profound shift.

What are the implications of the changes wrought by these new technologies? One is the rapid demise of consensus and mass culture. This could be a central factor in the polarisation of our society and (particularly) our politics. I know there are others. I suspect that the move toward young people living in gentrified urban enclaves with artisanal this and that is a reactionary movement to this isolation."