Jazz is dead. fix it.

[DonEsteban]

[crusoe]

Q: How do you get it in your ears ?
A: Open 'em up and listen

[mmuller]

There's hope. 5 musicians, no electricity used. Melody, dynamics, emotion and more chops than most any of us use or abuse.
Starts at 1:54. Just beautiful. Sing and dance away!

[cosmic gumbo]

When hope for jazz is 5 year old American country-classical chamber music, it's not very reassuring.

[crusoe]

I could cry when I think about what these 3 guys alone did for acoustic jazz.
R.I.P. Paco
McLaughlin's retired.
Al 's still active.

[lawson-stone]

I don't think any type of music "killed" jazz. Think, back in the 1930's-40's there were really only a few genre's of popular music. No rock, no metal, etc. Radio stations and local bands ruled, and recordings were purchased in far fewer numbers than today, when we can download dozens of tracks quickly and cheaply. Local bands and niche bands existed by had little or no access to the public.

What happened was the proliferation of many other types of music alongside jazz. The pie got sliced more ways. Jazz might have been overshadowed after being almost the only game in town, but it wasn't "killed." What kills it is when people look at the other types of music and decide jazz should be those things, rather than be itself.

The OP comment that Pat Metheny is not known in KC somehow seems crazy to me. The man has scored 14+ Grammy awards across a dozen categories and tours 200+ nights a year and makes a living at it. How could he do that if his music were failing or irrelevant? He has an enormous fan base and has done a lot of help jazz evolve and grow. Compared to rock bands, of course he's not got the same numbers, but to say he is a marker of the failure or death of jazz is just wrong on the face of it.

Modern music is a vast range of genres, styles, and end-purposes. Jazz players need to clarify the place of this music find ways to earn and keep audiences.

[JGinNJ]

When hope for jazz is 5 year old American country-classical chamber music, it's not very reassuring.

Yeah, I wouldn't call that jazz by any stretch. When I saw that lineup with banjo & mandolin I thought, oh God no, Bluegrass??!! For some reason it's rather popular 'round these parts.

[mmuller]

Yeah, I wouldn't call that jazz by any stretch. When I saw that lineup with banjo & mandolin I thought, oh God no, Bluegrass??!! For some reason it's rather popular 'round these parts.

Billy Strings leading the Bluegrass charge of the next generation. Listen to 1st single from his new album. Sounds pretty jazzed to me. New genres moving music forward. It's been happening since King Oliver took the steamboat north to Chicago.

[zigzag]

Sorry, but I can't agree that "jazz" is any more broken than anything else. Nothing really looks like it did even ten years ago. It's really gonna be interesting to see what the world looks like even a year from now after the shock it's experiencing today (and we aren't even in hurricane season, yet), not to mention the last couple of years.