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there is a career path for your "guy who's good at Youtube" types like Jacob Collier and Adam Neely. that's a different game than e.g. charlie parker might have been playing at an equivalent stage in his career.
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12-20-2022 10:24 PM
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I guess now is as good a time as any to click that Ignore thread button
Done.....
SLast edited by SOLR; 12-21-2022 at 01:45 PM.
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So what
Originally Posted by Guy In Lyon
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Come to that? I don't know....... but humans being humans I think to a large extent may have always been like that. I don't put a lot of stock in "scientific" studies but it's long been known that people are biased in favor of beauty. The standards of beauty change but the bias does not. Originally Posted by A. Kingstone
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Yeah, I mean, what is the world coming to. Chet Baker, Sinatra, Nat Cole, etc would like a word. Originally Posted by A. Kingstone
I think that most jazz musicians who is or was truly popular were, if not outright handsome, then very charismatic. The ones who broke into mainstream iconography certainly were
...the real show business for ugly people is of course politics
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LOL Originally Posted by Average Joe
Politics, for failed law degree holders. Government work, for people who can't cut it in the private sector.
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Here we go...
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Sometimes I search for a song on google and an old JGF thread comes up. It sure seems like it used to be a nice place.
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To the question of why jazz isn't popular, you probably need to look at its history. I'm no jazz historian, but it goes something like this.
It was popular. It was the music if the day. You could dance to it. Then came along Charlier Parker and things changed. Bebop was harder to dance to, difficult to understand, and was played in smaller clubs. Then came along Coltrane and more people struggled with jazz as a popular music. The antidote was rock and roll. That is a very bare-bones explanation.
Looking at why people don't like jazz now, it may have something to do with some jazz lacking entertainment value. Technical and intellectual virtuosity is lost on the average listener. Another very simple explanation is that popular music evolves all the time so what's popular today is passe tomorrow.
Like classical music, jazz will always have its followers. It's here to stay.
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Jazz moved away from the blues and playing by ear.
Blues is what keeps even a complex tune accessible.
Playing by ear is what elevates a recital into a show.
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Wow--so much heat.
Once a week, I sit in with/am tolerated by group of jazz-loving players who range from adequate to pretty-damn-good, technically. Most of them have been playing together for a decade or more, and the best of them are as musical as anybody I've encountered personally in a half-century of hanging around with musicians. The stylistic center is boppish readings (lots of love for Miles and Bill Evans), with a big dash of vocal standards, since there are a couple of good singers. And they all have day jobs--IT mostly, but also as university music faculty and an actual rocket scientist and one small-business guy.
The venue is the lounge room of a nice bar which is also part of a 120-seat concert venue, and the big crowds come in for tribute-band shows of various flavors that play that space. We get some midshow-break drinkers and a handful of stragglers after the big shows let out. The regular jazz-night audience is not big, and the demographic skews the same as it does for the local folk- and chamber-music societies, which is to say middle-aged and older. But the listeners are faithful and appreciative.
So: the jazz my friends produce is not "popular" in either the commercial or demographic senses, though to be fair, live music of any kind is a tough sell in our 80K-population metro area--even the rock/country bar scene has declined over the last decade, and both the folk- and chamber-music societies depend on grants to survive. (I'm the folkie grant-writer.)
Jazz isn't popular in the way that hip-hop or whatever else teens and young people of courting age follow. Nor are any of the genres and traditions I grew up with. Which is not the same as saying that they are irrelevant artistically, let alone dying. I'm not the only music lover whose sensibilities were shaped by music made by people who were dead before his grandparents were born. (For the record: the 1880s.)Last edited by RLetson; 12-25-2022 at 02:48 PM.
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Again, it has nothing to do with the shortcomings of jazz. The masses by definition listen to pop music. In this age, pop is so far divorced from art music, that it makes no difference how good jazz or any other good music is, the masses are just going to go ahead and listen to the popular crap that's out there. There's no changing it.
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More venues need to do the same and do live music at times where responsible adults don't have to go to them knowing they will lose sleep because of it, which just makes them less likely to invest in the risk of something new. Originally Posted by nick1994
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Exactly. My first thoughts were "Compared to what is it unpopular?" and "What other genres are equally unpopular?" Originally Posted by christianm77
This is pretty true of any live music club, but there is definitely something to the fact that people seem to be quite specific and niche (if you inquire for the details) when they say they either do or don't like jazz. Originally Posted by christianm77
I probably like every subgenre of jazz I've heard, but I also dislike a lot of jazz I hear in particular in all those genres. I've listened to tons of it because I got turned onto the stuff I like, so the "bad" stuff never totally turned me off, but I could see how someone just hearing subgenre X or even a sampling of it that they don't like might think it represents all jazz.
Lot of people do that with rap and country. People seem to be more aware of the range of pop and rock...so they just hate on certain niches of it.
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Michael Bubbly Originally Posted by wintermoon
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Of course, much of my taste runs to the moldy-fig end of things, but it seems to me that the deep roots of jazz are still alive and putting out good fruit. I first heard Catherine Russell on John Pizzarelli's Radio Deluxe and went digging for more to dig and found (among other things) this:
Her range is considerable, as is the muscianship of the players who accompany her here and in other contexts.
Then there are younger folk (not that CR is all that old) such as Samara Joy and and Pasquale Grasso
If "jazz" requires being out at the bleeding edge, then rootedness gets devalued. But what I value in music of all kinds is the sense of listening to the past as well as to the moment. On the other hand, if what's wanted is words we can dance to and a melody that rhymes, there's nothing wrong with that, either.
"Popular" is a quantitative, not a qualitative descriptor.
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It's interesting, to me at least, that what a few people have talked about as making up good music: a little old/a little new is really what jazz was for a long time: jazzing up the familiar.
My main gig is solo guitar & vocal stuff where I do some originals and a bunch of covers. Probably 60% of them have at least reached the level of being played on some popular late night TV show if not charting fairly high level, but not usually the hit for that artist unless it was a one hit wonder. The rest are either more obscure or B-side stuff, but with familiar forms. I'll often pitch it to venue owners as playing everyone 4th favorite songs.
I also never even really try to do note for note renditions and sometimes will even switch the genre entirely (I do U2's 'Desire' in a Bossa Nova-ish style, for example). I do some swing tunes, but purists would probably spit out their IPA's in disgust....but I don't really care what they think. There are also the people who want copy band type performances out of me, but they wind up being the very very small minority. The level of chops is significantly better than your average dude singing with and acoustic guitar, but I'm no virtuoso.
In my mind, I'm doing what jazz was doing: jazzing up the familiar and throwing in some new things.
I think jazz as a genre often "fails" to do this anymore because there's not a shared starting point (for the audience) that is being jazzed up.
The standards aren't familiar any more. Any jazzing up is of the already jazzed up versions anyway. (I often hear tunes that I know, but only realize that I know because my radio tells me so.)
Thus, a lot of jazz (maybe most) is now an inside joke in mixed company. The same can be said about some other genres, particularly the lyrical content, but there seems to be more people with the shared inside info to get those jokes.
And as many have said: it seems a lot of players aren't playing for audiences.
They're only playing for themselves...which seems to be working out well for them.
Seems a bit ironic though, for all the talk of jazz language and the conversation metaphors used to go out in public just to talk among ourselves.
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Reminds me of this... Originally Posted by LankyTunes
And as many have said: it seems a lot of players aren't playing for audiences.
They're only playing for themselves...which seems to be working out well for them.
For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me
what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being
somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being
where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Swing was popular. Everything afterwards was hip, or cool, but not pop. Jazz became the music of people who read books, wrote poems and watched foreign films. They did not want their music to be popular. They wanted it to be deep.
But then a younger generation decided pop was hip, what with the concept albums and the consciousness raising. So jazz was left behind. It had a good run.
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Yeah yeah yeah.... its old and stodgey and a bunch of dipshits in universities have ruined it.....but there's one thing we all should acknowledge....
There's a certain magic to a well done jazz performance in a dark jazz club. It transcends what's hip or cool or what happened in 1962 that made inaccessible to the average joe.
That magic will never go away. It is appealing to young and old, educated or not, rich or poor.
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I know this is a common meme - but I don't think this is fair. Originally Posted by JazzIsGood
It's not like a bunch of stodgy dipshits got together in 1964 and said 'this is the way we'll make our money bwahahahaha.'
The people who were on the faculties of lot of these places were truly fantastic musicians with real performing careers.
It's much fairer IMO to say, as jazz declined in the public eye and interest, it withdrew to the conservatoires and positive feedback process occurred where jazz became more and more associated with music schools, excepting cultural hotspots like New York. And as much as I might quibble about syllabuses and so on, those musicians were not to blame (of course there is also such a thing as the institutionalised jazz education person, but that's a separate issue. To read some accounts it's as if there exists a permanent state of Cold War between these idividuals and the performing musicians who teach on faculty.)
If you look at who teaches on leading jazz courses in the US, it's still people like Ron Carter and Kenny Barron. Hardly random schmos.
The other thing is if you look at any of the academic literature about Jazz education (quite often the stodgy dipshits narrative) a lot of the people complaining about modern jazz education and the demise of the apprenticeship system and so on are frequently the very people who are on faculty at this or that institution. And I think that in built skepticism of the value of modern jazz education is a really good thing. I think it's present even in younger faculty members. My own research gives me some cause for optimism, in fact.
The danger comes when jazz separates itself from the community of practice. I'm not saying it won't happen, but this hasn't happened yet anything like to the extent that some narratives make out.
I do suppose it depends were you study, of course.
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English Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Whos up to some little jazz-dubstep?
I bet with all the appropriate skills we can make it work!
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Congratulations. Your analysis speaks from my heart and hits the mark on so many points.
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I think a lot of why jazz isn't popular is because you need a fairly large skill set to play it / do it. Rap is popular because you don't need that. Lots of the stuff you hear on the radio is just big workstation synthesizers that one or two people have programmed and a singer; musicians aren't as required as they once were.
People who aren't musicians tend to like background music, and you need to listen to jazz to really get what's going on. Can any of you really work while music is on in the background? I can't! If there's music I either need to pay attention to it or shut it off, if I hear music it immediately grabs all my attention. Most people aren't like that, because it simply isn't that important. They prefer the 'take it or leave it' type of music and jazz just falls in the latter category because it takes knowledge to play and knowledge to appreciate.
Still though, it's more popular than opera, so there's that
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