What Killed Jazz? The Plot Thickens

The last time I wrote about the reasons for jazz's declining popularity (May 30, 2008), I cited jazz's abandonment of dance music in the late 1940s and jazz artists' selling out in California in the 1950s. Naturally, my post triggered a cascade of emails, which in turn, got me thinking. Again.

As I looked deeper into the perfect storm that emerged in the early 1950s to make jazz less relevant as popular music, other less evident and perhaps more influential factors surfaced.

Our quest for simplicity always demands a date and time for major historical turning points. The truth is that the reasons for most major events such as Rome's fall or the Great Depression are a bunch of little factors that converge at roughly the same time and feed off each other.

The same is true for the so-called Decline of Jazz. It would be so tidy to date the start of jazz's slide to Saturday, September 4, 1948, when Miles Davis first took the stage at the Royal Roost with his nonet and counted off Move. But blaming jazz musicians for creating art or branching out isn't fair. It also isn't complete history.

Here then are other factors that I believe played a fundamental role in changing public tastes and hastened jazz's fall from mass-market favor in the 1950s:

Sight v. sound. Television was introduced in April 1939 at the New York World's Fair, but the box didn't become affordable and popular until 1950, when sales kept doubling over periods of months. As television's acceptance accelerated, it changed our senses. Prior to television, society's tastes were driven mostly by sound, particularly through the playing of records and the radio. Plenty of people went to the movies and looked at photos in magazines. But hearing music was still the most common way to experience and evaluate it. Jazz thrived in this sound-centric environment.

Television's introduction made popular culture easier to absorb with the eyes and considerably more exciting than solely listening to records or radio. The more appealing television became in the early 1950s, the more record companies sought out animated musicians who were fun to watch. So by 1953, Bill Haley [pictured] and His Comets were a lot more exciting visually than Count Basie's sax section, for example.

Nice v. vice. From the late 1940s forward, jazz increasingly became associated in film with antisocial, deranged behavior. Somewhere along the way, jazz became a prop, used to enhance images of a high-risk lifestyle that undermined health and cohesive family life. Jazz musicians often were portrayed in film as a hopelessly dysfunctional and morally bankrupt group addicted to drugs and danger. Jazz musicians spoke their own language and in film lived life foolishly on the edge.

Part of this image shift was jazz's own fault, helped along by the hard lives that musicians led and the headlines of their drug problems and alternative lifestyles. By the early 1950s, jazz in film became the music of personal abuse and disaster.

Singles v. albums. In 1949, RCA Victor released the first 7-inch 45rpm record. It was developed in response to Columbia's introduction of the 10-inch 33 1/3 record. For the next two years, the two companies battled over which format would win out. Ultimately, both did, with Columbia and Decca issuing 45rpms in 1951.

As the popularity of the vinyl 45rpm surged, turntable manufacturers began making less expensive portable machines and marketing them to teens. Jazz record producers tended to favor the 10-inch 33 1/3 album over the 45 rpm in the early 1950s because it provided them with multiple tracks and larger covers on which to display images.

The rising popularity of 45-rpm singles with the teen market eventually led to payola—paying for the repeated radio play of selected singles. Repeated play enhanced the music's appeal with radio-listening kids and triggered sales. Jazz, meanwhile, remained focused primarily on the 10-inch album and, in 1956, the 12-inch LP.

Moving merchandise. With the introduction of customer-connected long-distance phone service in 1951, record companies found it easier to communicate directly with branch offices. National sales and marketing efforts could be consolidated and better tracked and controlled. Meanwhile, the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 paved the way for the Interstate Highway System, which was already underway. Once interstate roads were in place, records were easier to move from plants to different parts of the country.

Both developments made it easier for record companies to gauge demand and ship lightweight singles faster to clamoring teen markets. The same appetite for jazz singles and albums simply didn't exist.

Money talks. From a business standpoint, rock 'n' roll and r&b acts were a lot more profitable to produce than jazz bands. In many cases, rock acts consisted of fame-hungry kids who didn't mind record executives and producers forcing their names onto writing credits to reap royalties. For the record industry in the 1950s, rock 'n' roll was a license to print money, and the more producers and executives got a taste, the more attractive the music became to those who signed acts and set budgets. Which, of course, left jazz divisions with less and less.

Old v. young. Before the introduction of television, the youth culture as we know it today didn't exist in America. Young people for the most part yearned to look like their parents, since appearing older came with certain societal privileges. You can see this maturity mania in the clothing styles and attitudes of young people in the 1940s and early 1950s.

After television emerged, however, the culture shifts. Sexuality, physical appearance and vigor became more desirable traits for young people than dad's pipe and mom's hat. In such a climate, jazz had less and less relevance among a generation that prized rebellion and escape from the confinement of traditional family life. Rock 'n' roll understood those sentiments perfectly and even sounded better on teens' car radios.

Instrumental shift. In the 1930s, the most popular instrument was the clarinet. But the licorice stick sounded stale by the mid-1940s and was overtaken by the popularity of the saxophone. But by the early 1950s, the guitar started to replace the sax as the cool tool, since guitarists could sing while they played. Jazz instrumentalists couldn't compete.

What's more, the guitar was a lot easier and less expensive for teens to learn and play than a saxophone, trumpet or trombone. During the rise of the guitar, heavy and pricey jazz instruments fell out of favor with teens or were relegated to playing backup.

Boxed out. Finally, the new music that rock 'n' roll acts and r&b groups were composing and playing didn't really lend itself to jazz interpretations. Long dependent on Broadway shows and Tin Pan Alley standards, jazz no longer had new material to draw on that would connect with the next generation of listeners.

In short, jazz's fortunes started to decline as American popular culture, business and technology changed in the early 1950s. In fast order, record company executives discovered that promoting rock 'n' roll and r&b to kids using radio payola and cheap vinyl resulted in much higher profit margins than jazz bands. Add the unforgivable habit by producers of imposing co-songwriter credits, fat royalty checks and cheaper distribution costs, and rock 'n' roll was a big business waiting to get bigger. Sadly, jazz never had a chance.

Comments

[Dean]

Your "Nice vs. Vice" argument seems ludacris without specific examples of films that did this. Please elaborate.

[Doug Ramsey]

Here are a few related thoughts in a paragraph from my essay, "Big Bands and Jazz Composing-Arranging After World War Two" in The Oxford Companion To Jazz. It includes an additional element regarding transportation:

Following the war, most of the bands that dominated popular music before 1941 stayed in business in a declining market, some with more success than others. With dancing on the downswing, listeners did not take up the economic slack. Veterans raising families and buying houses did not have budgets for much live entertainment. Even in a recessionary period it became increasingly expensive to transport, board and feed 15 or 16 musicians. The musicians union introduced another recording ban in 1948, and in that year television sets began to move into American homes in numbers that decreased the sizes of audiences in clubs and concert halls. Additionally, as Gene Lees pointed out in his essay “Pavilion in the Rain” (Singers and the Song II, Oxford), the automobile was driving out public transportation. As streetcar lines and trolleys disappeared, it became difficult or impossible for those without cars to reach the big suburban or country halls where big bands so often played.

[Alan Kurtz]

Your May 30 and June 11 posts on "What Killed Jazz?" catalog a host of what you call "little factors that converge at roughly the same time and feed off each other" in contributing to "most major events such as Rome's fall or the Great Depression." I doubt that jazz's waning popularity in the 1950s truly qualifies as a major event, except to jazz artists, their families, friends and fans.

In any case, it's remarkable that in your combined 2,616 words, not once do you mention race or the civil rights movement. Indeed, the only reference to black America comes when you quote James Miller's book on the rise of rock 'n' roll.

This is a startling oversight. Surely it's no accident that jazz's declining popularity directly coincides with the civil rights movement. As one who lived through that era, I believe strongly that jazz's sagging commercial fortunes can be graphed in inverse proportion to the growing demand for racial equality. Jazz's widespread success in the 1920s and especially 1930s depended on crossover appeal, meaning whites supporting black music--even in its sanitized guises exploited by bandleaders from Paul Whiteman to Benny Goodman. To a lesser extent, the acceptance of such white emulators continued well into the 1950s, as Dave Brubeck and other West Coast jazzmen cultivated the newfound postwar college crowd and slightly older, fashion-conscious young bachelors consulting the latest issue of Playboy magazine to determine which musicians qualified as flavor of the month.

But by the mid-'50s, blacks were becoming increasingly vocal. "I can't stand the faggot-type jazz," Horace Silver told Down Beat in 1956, "the jazz with no guts. And the discouraging part is that the faggot-type jazz is getting more popularity than the jazz with real soul. The groups that play with a lot of guts are not making as much loot." Homophobic Horace didn't mention any names, but to informed readers he was obviously referring to Brubeck, Chet Baker, et al., who were just then raking in as much loot as Mr. Silver had guts.

Within 10 years, the militantly black Free Jazz movement had so alienated white listeners that jazz's ofay audience could now fit comfortably into a phone booth--with room to spare for Jimmy Rushing!

Or perhaps I'm jumping the gun, Marc. Are you planning a Part 3 of Who Killed Jazz? If so, I hope you'll consider what was after all not such a "little factor" in this saga.

[Trevor]

Alan, I don't understand your argument. Are you suggesting that jazz declined because white people became scared of buying jazz by black musicians?

[Alan Kurtz]

Trevor, sorry I wasn't more clear, but I do indeed believe that whites were frightened off by the broiling militancy of 1960s Free Jazz. Blacks were reclaiming their historical birthright to this music. White emulators such as Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker were no longer relevant, if indeed they'd ever been. And white fans were longer welcome, if indeed we'd ever been.

You may find such white flight chickenhearted. Perhaps we should have stood our ground. But, trust me, those were very intimidating times. When LeRoi Jones, in his liner notes for John Coltrane's Live at Birdland (1963), wrote of America's "essentially vile profile," there wasn't much doubt he meant white America, not black America.

And when Impulse released The New Wave in Jazz (1965), its original liner notes by Jones and his lieutenant Steve Young were downright apocalyptic. "These men are dangerous," Young wrote approvingly of Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, "and someday they may murder, send the weaker hearts and corrupt consciences leaping through windows or screaming through their destroyed dream worlds." Lest white folks miss the point, Young also invoked witch doctors, juju men, exorcism, nighttime mau-mau attacks, and music that "speaks of horrible and frightening things." Maybe you hadda be there, Trevor, but I for one was put off as much by the racist rhetoric as by the art it championed.

Finally, let me emphasize that I'm not talking here about musical merits. For all I know, Free Jazz may be considered indispensable by future historians. I am discussing only the relationship between black performers and the white audience that had until then supported jazz. Were we alienated by their antagonism? You bet! Was that reaction justified? You be the judge.

[Trevor]

Ah yes, I wasn't around to see it, but I understand your point now. Jazz indeed had a lot working against it.

[DJA]

Alan, do you have any actual evidence that white listeners declined as a percentage of the total jazz audience during the period you are talking about?

[Alan Kurtz]

DJA, that's a fair question. I take it you're not disputing jazz's loss of popularity during those years, but rather questioning what role white flight played. As far as I know, nobody kept tabs on the racial composition of customers who did NOT buy jazz records during that tumultuous time. I'm no statistician, but I suspect such a tally of the undone would've been quite a challenge.

The drop-off in coverage of jazz in the mass media, however, is self-evident. Believe it or not, jazz in the 1950s was a presence on AM radio, of all things. Not a major force, admittedly. But it could be found in metropolitan areas, and I don't mean only New York and L.A. I grew up in Pittsburgh, whose the most powerful AM station, KDKA, showcased the latest jazz releases in weekly broadcasts hosted by Sterling Yates. In nearby New Kensington, a smaller blue-collar city, WKPR DJs Phil Brooks or Jim Grey spun jazz records by the hour, day in and day out. Pittsburgh's "black" station, WAMO, stuck to R&B. Plenty of white teenagers listened religiously to WAMO DJs Bill Powell or Porky "Pork the Torque" Chadwick. But WAMO's market share was miniscule compared to KDKA, with its huge, predominately white audience. By the early '60s, AM jazz programming had gone the way of the Edsel. If whites in significant numbers had continued responding to jazz, this disappearing act would not have taken place.

Likewise the print media, from local newspapers to national magazines such as Esquire and Playboy, either eliminated or at best deemphasized jazz coverage. And after a short-lived fad for jazz soundtracks to such TV crime dramas as "M Squad" and "Peter Gunn," Hollywood quickly retooled to reflect changing musical tastes. Televised performances by jazz artists ("Jazz Scene USA," Jazz Casual," etc.) vanished completely. As with AM radio, publishers and TV targeted mass markets, not small segments. In those days, there were no riches in niches. As long as jazz attracted both whites and blacks, it made economic sense for the mass media to embrace jazz. Once it stopped appealing to whites, jazz was no longer welcome at the party.

Additional evidence is provided by the plight of jazz nightclubs. In his book "This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture" (2007), historian Iain Anderson lists the leading venues that went belly up during the first half of the 1960s, including Boston's Storyville, Philadelphia's Showboat, Chicago's Blue Note and San Francisco's Blackhawk. Most symbolically, the flagship of modern jazz, midtown Manhattan's Birdland also failed. Self-styled Jazz Corner of the World, Birdland opened in 1949 with namesake Charlie Parker as headliner. During its early years the club flourished with 800 nightly paid admissions, and from my occasional vantage in Birdland's bleachers, it was obvious that most customers were white. In 1965 Birdland's featured attraction became a "For Lease" sign. Sadly, for jazz, it was a sign of the times.

Anyhow, DJA, now that I've shown you mine, please show me yours. Do you have any actual evidence that white listeners did NOT decline as a percentage of the total jazz audience during the period we are talking about?

[DJA]

Alan, you haven't answered the question. Nobody disputes that jazz declined in popularity during the 1960's, and all of the examples you cite point to a general decline. But the conventional view is that both black listeners and white listeners turned away from jazz to other forms of music during this time, and nothing you've said supports the idea that there was any kind of racial disparity at work.

Do you have any actual evidence that white listeners did NOT decline as a percentage of the total jazz audience during the period we are talking about?

That's not how this works, Alan. You are the one making the assertion, so it's up to you to back it up, preferably with facts and data. If you claim that, for instance, extraterrestrials walk among us, the proper response when asked to prove it is not "Well, do you have any actual evidence that extraterrestrials do NOT walk among us?"

[DJA]

Apparently HTML is not enabled in comments -- grr.

Second paragraph in the comment above should be a blockquote.

[Alan Kurtz]

DJA, please excuse me for not giving you the "proper response," as you call it. But discussing this topic with you is futile because you've set up a straw man. First you mischaracterize my comments, then you demand that I defend your mischaracterization. It's sly, but specious.

On June 11 and 12, I noted that jazz waned in popularity coincident with the civil rights movement, and recalled that jazz's previous success depended on crossover appeal, meaning whites supporting black music. I went on to assert that whites were frightened by the militancy of 1960s Free Jazz, and cited examples of whites being castigated by black spokesmen for the New Wave in Jazz. I emphasized that I was describing only the relationship between black performers and the white audience that had until then supported jazz, and concluded that we were alienated by their antagonism.

Nowhere did I claim that white listeners declined as a percentage of the total jazz audience. That insuperable concept, DJA, arose first in your own post to this thread on June 14.

I responded in good faith, recounting examples of how the mass media--targeted predominately at whites, not blacks--abandoned its coverage of jazz when it became clear that the market was shrinking. I also listed top jazz nightclubs--attended predominately by whites, not blacks--that went under during this time.

And in reply, you fault me failing to support "the idea that there was any kind of racial disparity at work." Said idea, DJA, is yours, not mine. I never claimed there was any such racial disparity at work.

Sir, I have enough trouble justifying my own arguments. I'll be damned if I can justify yours.

And as far as extraterrestrials walking among us, I've encountered them often. They have a special gift for twisting things I say to their own advantage.

[DJA]

Alan,

"I never claimed there was any such racial disparity at work."

Actually, you did. A racial disparity is central to your argument of "white flight" from jazz. Otherwise, it's not "white flight," it's just "flight."

Trevor ased:

"Are you suggesting that jazz declined because white people became scared of buying jazz by black musicians?"

You responded in the affirmative:

"Trevor, sorry I wasn't more clear, but I do indeed believe that whites were frightened off by the broiling militancy of 1960s Free Jazz."

It is implicit in your argument that if "whites were frightened off," then *necessarily*, the proportion of the jazz audience made up by whites must have shrunk.

Otherwise -- if the jazz audience shrunk because both whites and blacks stopped listening in more or less equal proportions -- then there's no "white flight," as you claim, just a general decline in jazz listernship.