Who Killed Jazz and When?

Why and when did jazz cease to be mainstream music? Many fans and jazz legends I talk to wryly point to the Beatles' arrival at Kennedy Airport in 1964. Others cite Elvis Presley's TV appearance in 1956. But both charges seem unfair, really. These cultural events merely were the effects of trends set in motion years earlier, not the cause of jazz's jolt. Besides, one art form is never accountable for the decline of another. Other factors are always at play, some more surprising than others.

The best argument I've heard for jazz's declining popularity in the mid-1950s and 1960s revolves around jazz's abandonment of dance music in the late 1940s. As jazz became more focused on technique and prowess and less on entertainment, the argument goes, the music ceased to have large-scale social significance. Once jazz and jazz musicians began to take themselves too seriously and the music catered to distant outsiders rather than the jukebox, a beat-hungry generation turned elsewhere for its soundtrack.

But was jazz's growing sophistication in the mid-1950s calculated snobbery or simply the natural maturation of an art form? Did jazz really undermine itself by cultivating a cool and detached mystique instead of engaging the youth culture, which rock 'n' roll did so shrewdly in the years that followed? Or was jazz simply too self-respecting to meet the callow demands of the 45-rpm-obsessed youth culture of the mid-1950s?

The moment jazz decided it was an art form that required listeners rather than dancers, its mass appeal was in jeopardy. High art, by definition, has value, and value has little currency in America, where the next hot thing always trumps integrity. What jazz failed to recognize during those crucial years in the early 1950s was the emerging commercial power of the youth culture and its relative disinterest in creative genius. Jazz's reluctance or inability to satisfy this influential market's thirst for excitement and stimulation was a fatal error. The "let them come to us" attitude so prevalent in jazz then and now forfeited a critical advantage to r&b and rock 'n' roll that it never regained.

Jazz musicians themselves also played a role in the music's declining mass appeal. In the early 1950s, jazz increasingly required musicians who had a strong knowledge of music theory, composition and arranging. The total number of musicians playing jazz declined compared to the 1930s and 1940s, when hundreds of bands played dance music. Once jazz made a conscious decision to become high art, fewer musicians were accomplished enough to compete or excel at it.

By the mid-1950s, the opportunities for marginal jazz musicians dried up as proficient headliners consolidated audiences. Those musicians who found jazz too challenging or couldn't land gigs or recording deals gravitated toward the blues, r&b and jump boogie. This music was a lot easier to play comparatively, it emphasized a steady beat for dancers, and it had much more stage and sex appeal—all elements that jazz had abandoned in its bid to be high art.

Compounding jazz's troubles during the late 1940s and 1950s were jazz musicians themselves. Many jazz musicians admired r&b artists and quietly played on r&b recordings. Who could blame them? Like everyone else, jazz musicians had families and bills to pay, and many artists needed to supplement incomes that concert jazz couldn't satisfy. So from the late 1940s onward, jazz musicians like James Moody, Ben Webster [pictured], Tadd Dameron and so many others played, toured and recorded intermittently with r&b bands. I even heard Sonny Rollins confess recently that he admired Louis Jordan when he was coming up.

Jazz musicians didn't trawl for the extra work. They often were the ones hotly pursued by r&b artists and emerging labels eager to add cache and chops to their record dates. Jazz musicians also were less likely to goof up and cause costly retakes. As James Miller writes in the superb Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977:

"One of the songs Wynonie Harris sang on December 29, 1947, Good Rockin' Tonight, would become a best-selling hit, played on jukeboxes and aired on radio stations across black America. And by popularizing the word 'rock,' Harris' recording would herald a new era in American popular culture...The band consisted of seasoned musicians, most of them jazzmen like Oran "Hot Lips" Page. [pictured]"

Like many top jazz musicians in late 1947, Hot Lips Page was in search of a viable payday just prior to the musician's union recording ban of 1948. As strange as it may seem now, Hot Lips would play a small but vital role in rock's ascent.

As the 1950s wore on, other jazz greats were lured to Hollywood to compose and arrange for television and the movies. The rewards and recognition were too big to pass up. Some jazz artists even helped marginal rock acts get started. One of these jazz musicians, writes Mick Brown in the newly published and excellent Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector, was guitarist Barney Kessel:

"Kessel was [Phil] Spector's idol, and Spector even got to meet Kessel when he was 15 years old...Kessel offered Spector some surprising advice in 1957. It was one thing to love jazz and to play it, [Kessel] told [Spector], but he would not recommend a career as a jazz musician. Philip should look at the big picture. Fashions in music were cyclical, and jazz was on the downswing; it was rock and roll that people wanted to listen to now. If Philip wanted to make a career in music he should be thinking of becoming a songwriter or a record producer...

"Shortly after meeting Spector, Kessel would take Ricky Nelson [pictured], the 16-year-old star of the television program The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and produce his first record, a cover version of Fats Domino's I'm Walkin, which went on to sell more than 1 million copies. Kessel would go on to perform on countless pop sessions for artists including Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys as well as working with Spector himself."

So when Alan Kurtz wondered in a post at Jazz.com earlier this week why jazz and Cyrus Chestnut are so obsessed with Elvis, the answer is that jazz musicians directly or indirectly made Elvis possible. Why shouldn't they share in the King's riches? The bigger question I suppose, is this: Why after all these years content to be high art does jazz continue its silly pursuit of mass-market approval? The fact is, for jazz to survive, it must remain high art. Once it dumbs down and rushes after the mass market, it will truly become road kill. There simply are too many other forms of disposable music out there that are far better at cashing in on tastes and trends.

Ultimately, art moves with money, and eventually money corrupts the quality and purity of art, transforming it from personal expression to commercial manipulation. Jazz's popularity waned in the 1960s because in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, jazz made a conscious decision to be high art, and not all musicians were gifted or financially able to make the sacrifices imposed on serious artists. There's nothing jazz or jazz musicians or record company executives could have done to stop the shifting sands. The fact that jazz has survived as long as it has remains something of a miracle. We can thank the hundreds of artists who remained true to jazz's origins and traditions over the years despite the commercial hardships. Good taste may not pay well but it lasts longer than faddish Faustian bargains.

So, who's ultimately responsible for knocking jazz out of the mainstream box? It wasn't Elvis or the Beatles. Or the Vietnam War. Or television. Jazz musicians simply decided that they would not compromise what they were playing or developing to satisfy a teen craving. Their biggest error, I suppose, was not realizing that the emerging popularity of r&b and rock wasn't a fad but a revolution. But what of it? Kids were never going to hang out in basements necking to Thelonious Monk or Clifford Brown. And America is better off for it. Ultimately, jazz is for listening, not dancing. Jazz should stop worrying about Elvis and the Beatles, and think a little more about preserving the joy and art of Bird, Louis, Miles, Max and the Duke.

Comments

[Michael Steinman]

I don't pretend to know what High and Low are in art, and I wonder if those are boxes that ultimately prove confining. What does occur to me is that the gap between jazz and popular music widened year by year -- depending on how those terms were defined. In 1928, Bix could happily fit in with Whiteman; in 1938, Berigan could co-exist with a sweet singer or a formulaic arrangement. With the harmonic and rhythmic changes that bebop required to define itself -- in opposition to what had gone before -- the gap was too broad to jump. It's very hard to imagine a Fats Navarro chorus on a Frankie Laine record. This is perhaps lamentable in terms of jazz and the marketplace, but all artistic movements take their identity in opposition to something, so it's inevitable. Musicians DO want to be famous and affluent, and who can blame them -- but if the cost of fame is the loss of one's soul, then it's sad. Ironically, the current marketplace doesn't even seem to offer fine musicians much opportunity to sell out . . . something to consider! Thanks for provoking such thoughts, Marc.

[Stan McDonald]

Seems ironic to me that the decline of popular interest in jazz is attributed both to musicans' self-indulgent failures to follow the fads of R&B and Rock, while some were drawn into them; especially "marginal" players who allegedly couldn't hack the "high art" that jazz then or now supposedly has to purvey.

I sailed through the 1950's and the dearth of the 60's, blissfully ignoring the pop fads and later what I considered the bop and "cool", diversions. Even now, I sail on in ignorance, as I have done for over 50 years -- being a member of or leading a seven piece traditional jazz band (no,not "Dixieland").

Having a good day job was key to playing what I liked. "Let them come to me" still works for me, and they do -- not in the greatest numbers, but the quality of appreciation is as heartening as if playing for thousands (as I had at times in the past)

We continue to play everything from Jelly Roll Morton to Bechet and Ellington, with an abundance of pop tunes that lend themselves to swinging, collective improvisation (with some head-arranged parts.) And, yes, dancing is encouraged and greatly enjoyed -- as it was when this all began.

The comment that musicans were or are not good enough to play "high art" applies not only to those in the 50's or 60's who did not have the sophistication implied, but it is my firm belief that the decline of music that is popularly "accessible," such as that played by my Blue Horizon Jazz Band -- and superbly exemplified by the De Paris brothers in the 1950's and 60's -- applies at least equally to traditional jazz, and those musicians who ignore or eschew it.

Either most musicians are not interested in the art of collective improvisation, or most likely, it is simply too challenging and difficult to do so in a coherent fashion, requiring full mastery of the key elements of any music that can be meaningful to the public: melody, harmony and rhythm. This is truly a High Art that is implicity ignored.

It strikes me that bands gave up on this concept for the sheer individual and collective difficulty of playing improvised, small band music cohesively; hence the evolution of big bands; written arrangements; their economic infeasability; and the subsequent modernist tendencies which gave any individualist free reign to ignore the basics, and the tendency for technique to become an end in itself.

The public -- my public at least -- remains loyal and regularly moved by the expression of EMOTION, which is what I first thought and continue to believe that jazz music -- or any other art form -- is all about.

Technique is only useful to me -- or my band -- to the extent that it serves that end. We work at that and judge ourselves accordingly -- as does our audience -- on how successfully we express our individual and collective feelings. As we play, we are totally engaged in a dialog about those emotions and our pleasure in sharing them with ourselves and with our audience -- most especially in putting them in clear and musically transparent terms -- including expressions that would be socially unacceptable if put in words -- or equally so if muddled by incompetent improvisation.

That is the challege of my traditional jazz, the source of my pleasure in playing it and above all, the excitement and joy our audiences take in sharing the inherent risks of balancing spontaneity and organization -- as they truly perceive our endeavor.

Stan McDonald www.bluehorizonjazzband.com

[Tony]

Art forms have a natural, organic life of growth, maturity and decay. One might as well ask, "What happened to the epic poem?" Or, "What happened to the blank verse play?" Yes, these thing survive, but can hardly be considered active art forms. They are museum pieces, or academic subjects. Similarly, playing Dixieland and paying no attention to some of the most important revolutions in music, is also a form of academicism, at best. Jazz will only sirvive if enough people exist who can use the form to express their deepest artistic and aaesthetic insights, and enough who listen for those insights.

[Ray Hunter]

I can remember reading a paperback book on Jazz by Marshall Stearn and in the back fly leaf was a fold out which had on it a really great "family tree" drawing setting out all the branches of music that came in at the roots and how out of trunk that was JAZZ,out came all the of shoots of modern music as was then in the late 60's and you can add on if you will all who have come about since, His basic idea was That Jazz is the backbone of the last century's music and i still hold that to be true , the most recent forms are as i see it the very week top most branches burnt by the sun (too much money from an audience that never got the chance to hear the likes of the music i have in my collection)

[Ray Hunter]

I can remember reading a paperback book on Jazz by Marshall Stearn and in the back fly leaf was a fold out which had on it a really great "family tree" drawing setting out all the branches of music that came in at the roots and how out of trunk that was JAZZ,out came all the of shoots of modern music as was then in the late 60's and you can add on if you will all who have come about since, His basic idea was That Jazz is the backbone of the last century's music and i still hold that to be true , the most recent forms are as i see it the very week top most branches burnt by the sun (too much money from an audience that never got the chance to hear the likes of the music i have in my collection)

[Peter Gerler]

I must disagree with Marc Myers that “jazz is for listening, not dancing.” There’s an old saying in New Orleans: “If you can’t shake it, what’d you bring it for?” More than anything else, jazz has always been defined by its rhythm—and as Gunther Schuller has pointed out in his "Early Jazz," most African languages have no word for “art.” This is because in Africa as well as in New Orleans, music wove itself into the fabric—the action--of everyday life. In the Crescent City, daily parades for advertising, holiday celebrations, and funerals pulled people along in the street, high stepping and gyrating in “second lines.” Anyone who has moved with such a parade feels no distinction between him- or herself and the music. Memoirs from numerous turn-of-century New Orleans players recall the mandate for playing softly—so they could hear the dancers’ feet. Why? Because the rhythm of those feet was part of the music. Just as in call-and-response in the Baptist and Sanctified churches, the musicians responded to the shuffle of those feet. That rhythm—together with the live playing of their fellow band members—was their “score.”

Those doubting that jazz music is for dancing need only listen to Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers doing "Kansas City Stomps," or Clarence Williams’ Blue Five playing "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" (with Louis Armstrong on cornet and Sidney Bechet on reeds). Anyone who can remain calm, stationary, and “just listening” to these performances has at least a few unconnected wires. And that music—out of New Orleans—is what first came to be called “jazz.”

So—I agree that jazz changing from dance music to “art” helped bring about its commercial demise. But a change in form may not equate to a change in substance. Even in today’s (June 2, 2008) posting of the Cecil Taylor/Jazz Ensemble You Tube, one can still hear the pulse and color of a New Orleans brass band, fading into the distance.

Here’s the thing: music—any music--begins with rhythm. A regular succession of events (beats) becomes a frequency—and a pitch. Lose those events, and you lose the music. It doesn’t matter how far down the river of jazz we have traveled. Ellington said it right: “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

These days, we too easily associate the word “swing” with the “Swing Era”—as though it were just a style. But swing comes from an event: it is a verb—not a noun or adjective. Swinging comes from letting go into a moment, into gravity. It comes from playing together, in concert and in feeling. Louis Armstrong showed us how to swing as soloists. But Louis came up among the great brass bands of New Orleans, listening to Joe Oliver blow with the Onward, and playing himself in the rocking Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra, with Papa Celestin. Louis got his pronounced swing out of the steady four of those marching bands, and from their evolving rhythmic pulse as they began to “rag” the music. When that happened, nothing in American—or world—music would ever be the same again.

Peter Gerler
pgerler@verizon.net