More booing, please!

Last week, the Met opened its new production of Tosca and as the director took his curtain call, a vocal minority of the audience booed. I have to say, I’m envious of the opera crowd.

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.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=2900978]

I like the direction you're going with this blog. I think the problems you have articulated so far --over-emphasis on tradition leading to stagnation, and the lack of genuine criticism-- are problems faced by many creative endeavors/communities. I saw several parallels to issues I have noticed in the LEGO fan community, and the webseries production community (which I am just beginning to dip my toes into).

As a casual jazz fan I must admit that my collection consists mostly of the old masters. I got into The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau last year purely by accident, and I haven't really had a chance to branch out. Part of this is because music is only one of my many interests and jazz is only one many genres I'm interested in. But another problem is definitely the lack of mainstream coverage of jazz. It's easy enough for me to stumble across reviews of the latest altrock albums in the places I go for reviews of movies, TV shows, etc. But to find out about new jazz stuff, I'm going to have to got to a niche site, which is probably going to overwhelm me and (as you point out) maybe not help me figure out what's worth listening to and what isn't.

Looking forward to seeing where you go with this and hopefully find some awesome new jazz along the way.

(I just figured out what the header pic is - very clever.)

[Will]

I dont know much about jazz (or LEGOs), but I do know something about the US National Soccer team.

And the summer of '09 has been a watershed for the team not because they beat Spain and almost beat Brazil, but because they're finally being subjected to the same kind of criticism that surrounds national and club teams around the world. We haven't murdered a defender for an own goal yet, but there's still time.

Great post and keep it up.

[il maestro]

I agree with the other two commentators -- this is a very interesting subject. I often feel exactly the same way at classical concerts. Not everyone in our "community" is quite so knowledgeable, vocal and opinionated; and in the case of the hubbub at the Met (covered in a great article by Alex Ross: http://tinyurl.com/artosca) the booing was mainly directed at the stage director and set designer, so people were more responding to what they saw than what they heard.

DJA makes a great point about needing a Pitchfork for other genres. Jazzfork sounds like it should be your next project -- it's very possible that the market is ready to be exploited.

Interestingly, Pitchfork DOES cover Nico Muhly.

I'll never forget one of the worst classical concerts I ever went to, a massive and massively boring piece by a supposedly good composer named Bernard Rands at the Chicago Symphony. This was the most bloated, overblown calamity to ever bore me to death. As for the rest of the audience, lets just say that the snoring spoke for itself. And the response at the piece's end? Tepid applause. The worst. I still regret that I didn't have the guts to stand up and hurl invective (and perhaps produce) at the composer.

Interestingly, while I yearn to rid the classical music world of its codes of conduct and decorum, I would actually like to see audience attire lean in a more formal direction.

We're in this one together and I think its really up to people like you and me to infuse the music world with our passion and create the sort of projects that will really make a difference in people's relationship with all kinds of music.

[il maestro]

Too much of a good thing?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/more-boos-at-the-met-this-time-at-aida/?hp