This isn’t the first time opera audiences have booed, as Charles and Mirella Jona Affron noted in today’s Times, it’s a vestige from opera’s days as bawdy public entertainment when debates over the score of La Traviata might result in fisticuffs. Terry Teachout riffed on this phenomenon the last time a met production opened to boos, and arrived at a conclusion I agree with: booing might not be polite, but it’s a hell of a lot better than robotic ovations and thoughtless praise.
Ever since I started reading jazz reviews, I’ve marveled at how often they’re positive. With a few notable exceptions like Ben Ratliff’s pointed takedown of an Eric Lewis pop covers performance at (Le) Poisson Rouge, jazz reviews tend toward praise and neutral description. Compare this to book, movie, and restaurant criticism, where the likes of Anthony Lane, Michiko Kakutani, and Adam Platt often turn their words into assassin's bullets. Other than the occasional pot shot at Wynton Marsalis or John Zorn, anyone scanning through mainstream jazz coverage would get the impression that almost all contemporary performances are, well, pretty good.
In wasn’t always like this. A quick glance through the collected work of longtime New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett shows just how how much deep and sometimes negative analysis one used to find in jazz writing. When John Coltrane died, poet and critic Philip Larkin famously quipped that while he mourned Coltrane’s death like the death of any man, “it [left] in jazz a vast, blessed silence.” If a famous jazz musician died tomorrow, would anyone dare type such words?
I suspect jazz’s current status at the farthest reaches of the commercial boondocks has a lot to do with the timidity of its criticism. A writer who cares about jazz and has been lucky enough to score an assignment with a mainstream publication will want to do his part to champion the music, not tear it down. After all, jazz is already taking a financial beating and jazz musicians are hard working artists scrounging to get by, unleashing on them Pauline Kael-like scorn seems not only counter to jazz’s best interests, but also just plain mean.
Yet the idea that positive vibes will save jazz strikes me as dangerously illusory. What’s needed are more fearless, honest, and engaged voices who won’t care about convincing the world that jazz is good but will convince the world that it matters. For the last twenty plus years, the debates over the definition of jazz could have yielded a wealth of this kind of incisive criticism, but instead writers and musicians dismissed the music of the other side without serious engagement. Where are the Stanley Crouch reviews that analyze the albums of Medeski, Martin, and Wood instead of just dismissing them as “not jazz”? Where are the reviews of more progressive minded critics questioning Wynton Marsalis’s approach to improvisation rather than just savaging his rhetoric? You might be able to unearth some examples (and I’d love to read them), but I think you’ll find them to be few and far between.
Part of this critical absence stems from the marginalization of jazz in the mainstream media, meaning that only a handful of writers in the country have jobs that force them to listen to and write about a wide swath of the music. Nate Chinen and Ben Ratliff at the Times have to cover Jamie Cullum as well as Ken Vandermark, and that means they’re going to have to analyze critically some music that they don’t really like. If you’re a freelance jazz writer pitching magazines and alt weeklies, however, your best shot at landing a piece is to prop up the next big thing, not break down the technical faults of some mildly successful tenor saxophonist.
This state of affairs isn't going to improve any time soon. As the jazz audience and the print media decline in tandem, outlets with less and less space are going to give fewer and fewer words to jazz. The Internet, journalism’s savior and executioner, should be riding to the rescue, but most jazz websites leave much to be desired. How many jazz sites are really engaged in serious criticism? All About Jazz, a site for which I frequently write and the winner of the Jazz Journalists Association best website award, depends on volunteer contributors who are, by and large, riffing on their favorite musicians. As an AAJ contributor, you don’t get assignments, you figure out which shows and albums you want to review. No one gets paid at AAJ, so unless you have a masochistic streak or really like writing hatchet jobs, you’re going to seek out music that you already enjoy or that you’re pretty sure you will enjoy. Because of that, a lot of AAJ reviews have a have a gushing, fanboy slant.
The blogosphere, of course, does opinionated and in-depth better than any other current media, and the jazz blogosphere has some true gems (noted on the right-hand column on the steadily growing “Conversation” list). Yet most of the best jazz blogs are written by musicians, which means that while they provide excellent analysis, they are also, very understandably, hesitant to call out their peers. Even bloggers who don’t pull their punches don’t seem ideal as the first wave of jazz popularizers. The blogosphere is built for niches, and while a great jazz blogger might find a loyal audience of jazz readers, it’ll be difficult for him to ever reach, say, that smart 17-year-old who digs Charles Mingus but has never heard of Ethan Iverson or Miguel Zenón and doesn’t think of jazz as something that’s played today outside of the high school jazz combo.
When I spoke with the composer/conductor/blogger Darcy James Argue a few weeks ago, he lamented that the jazz scene didn’t have its own Pitchfork, the indie rock hub that has been crucial to building a following for bands like Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio. Pitchfork, of course, doesn’t only give raves, it pans plenty, a sign that it asks writers to engage regularly and critically with a lot of different bands. More than anything else, jazz criticism needs more of this kind of regularity, and if reviewers step up who are fearless, offensive, and occasionally irresponsible, so much the better.
A lot of musicians talk about lack of accessibility being jazz’s biggest problem in failing to reach new audiences. Why should demanding indie rock acts like the Dirty Projectors get devoted followings and demanding indie jazz acts like Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society work at the fringes? The music itself doesn’t seem to be the biggest hurdle; it’s the stuffy jazz system, catering to an aging audience, that a lot of musicians and fans fault. If you can accept that hypothesis, then you might also buy that idea that a jazz Pitchfork could reach a large, latent jazz audience. All people need is the right kind of encouragement to give jazz a serious listen, this theory goes, then the music will sell itself. I admit this requires a leap of faith, but I think great presentation and good writing could help "save" jazz, helping to foster an audience that would, like those pesky opera fans, care enough about what its hearing to jeer as well as cheer.
