Terry Teachout’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Can Jazz Be Saved?”, ignited an unusually public (for jazz) debate over the music’s supposedly declining fortunes and what can be done to rescue it. Jazz has been the center of my musical life for as long as I’ve been listening to music, and while I certainly revere the old masters, jazz’s present has always excited me most. That puts me, I think, in the minority of self-described jazz listeners. It’s not unusual for me to meet a jazz fan who knows little of the music after A Love Supreme, a consequence of both the music’s commercial marginalization and its deep evocation of nostalgia.
Jazz is America’s music, we’re told, and like America’s pastime, it lives in a constant state of self-celebration and tribute. The predominant practices of jazz reinforce this habit. In the 1950s, jazz “standards” meant the Broadway show tunes and Tin Pan Alley jingles popular at the time. Jazz musicians broke apart those universally familiar melodies and recreated, if not elevated, them. In the 2000s, “standards” means the Broadway show tunes and Tin Pan Alley jingles popular in the 1940s and 50s. The reinterpretation of these songs is a conversation with history, not, as it once was, with contemporary pop culture.
Like many jazz fans, I love 1950s standards both as songs and as the parchment on which much of the music’s history is written. When a musician like Brad Mehldau plays “All The Things You Are,” it doesn’t sound quaint; it sounds like he’s adding a bold new chapter to one of our great narratives—he’s conversing with all the other great musicians of the last 70 years who have riffed on that richest of Jerome Kern tunes.
I’m an unabashed lover of tradition: my favorite sport is baseball; my favorite music jazz; one of my favorite places a boys summer camp in Maine that’s obsessed with its history and its founding year (1919); and one of my favorite magazines a storied institution whose literary editor once called it a 150 year-old “American project.” That might make me sound like a fusty old man, but the more I reflect on it, I think it’s a way to feel less alone. Tradition gives us a measure of immortality by placing us in the context of others—we’re part of an ongoing musical conversation, the “proud Yankee history,” an “American project”—rather than just howling, unheard, into the void. This is ultimately illusory—traditions have a duration not all that much longer than human lives—but tradition gives us comfort, and more importantly, a nobler raison d’etre than self-promotion.
Yet toasting tradition alone leads nowhere but backward. As many jazz musicians have pointed out, the music’s greatest tradition is innovation and change. Dwelling too long on celebrating Armstrong and Ellington ultimately betrays their legacy. Most jazz musicians get this, but a lot of jazz fans don’t. The question facing jazz, I think, is how to close this gap, how to get audiences back out to the clubs and back into the conversation. How to make them care as passionately about Brad Mehldau as they do about Bill Evans.
When the nation’s best jazz magazine, Jazz Times, was purchased by Madavor Media, we saw one bleak possibility for the music’s future. Madavor makes its money off titles like Doll Reader and Teddy Bear and Friends. This isn’t a company that specializes in cutting edge, it’s a company that specializes in niche. Its titles cater to hobbyists and collectors who left the auditorium long ago to go play with their toys in vacant classrooms. I want jazz to continue to matter. I want jazz to continue to speak to larger issues of society and spirituality. I don’t want jazz, for all its historical awareness, to ever become a conversation with itself.
