online.wsj.com— The audience for America’s great art form is withering away and the time of believing that jazz can appeal to anything approaching a mass audience is over.
Aug 8, 2009View in Crawl 4
It's also entirely possible that the folks who love JAZZ are being hit hard by the economic down-turn, such that they can't afford to go out as much or buy records.
Which makes me just as sad to hear as if you'd said "I'd take rap/hip-hop over jazz". There's no competition between genres. You can like them both.
If anything's killing jazz, it's that the jazz that's readily available is "smooth" jazz (crap) and, sometimes, swing (fun, but not a great representation of how brilliant jazz can be). Be a friend to your friends and share with them your Miles Davis.
When I doscovered jazz in the 1970s, it was a musical education for someone whose city hadn't heard of much beyond the top 40 crap of the day, whether it was country or pop. Jazz was not on the map.So I listened and bought tons of LPs until the day when I found out that jazz had become academic. When I found out that the then current generation of fans wanted to analyse, critique and show off their musical knowledge.It wasn't fun anymore, since the musicians were all classically trained and could soupt off arpeggios in 6ths and minor chords galore. And fans did the same pontificating.Jazz was originally about taking a well-known melody and making it into somrething new. It was about having fun playing with the music, instead of analysing it to death. Once the academics got to it, the music died and young people turned to rock, where the rules were not yet written in "stone". (Forgive the pun.)There's when the music truly died.
I have to disagree, I took music appreciation and its not for everyone, hell it was boring. I like to draw and like art history, but I understand its not interesting to everyone else.The only thing interesting was how music, art and literature all went through very similar movements and influenced each other at times.
Who says something has to live forever, if it does it won't mean as much and go unappreciated. There is no almighty genre of music nor is there a completely rubbish genre. Take a look at classical music, there were plenty of hack composers who some of them had fifteen minutes of fame but in the grand scope of time are forgotten. I'm sure the same will be true for today's music. Everything changes but nothing ever changes.
Jazz can't die. I mean, I'm sure that they wrote an article in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, ect. that Jazz is dying. It's too broad of a category to fall away. There are many people who've dedicated their lives to the preservation of Jazz music, and it's being well preserved.
Closed AccountAug 10, 2009
It's also entirely possible that the folks who love JAZZ are being hit hard by the economic down-turn, such that they can't afford to go out as much or buy records.
mqduckAug 10, 2009
Which makes me just as sad to hear as if you'd said "I'd take rap/hip-hop over jazz". There's no competition between genres. You can like them both.
mqduckAug 10, 2009
If anything's killing jazz, it's that the jazz that's readily available is "smooth" jazz (crap) and, sometimes, swing (fun, but not a great representation of how brilliant jazz can be). Be a friend to your friends and share with them your Miles Davis.
caffienemanAug 10, 2009
I don't believe that jazz is dying, way better than the crap that's on radio nowadays
rrwestAug 10, 2009
When I doscovered jazz in the 1970s, it was a musical education for someone whose city hadn't heard of much beyond the top 40 crap of the day, whether it was country or pop. Jazz was not on the map.So I listened and bought tons of LPs until the day when I found out that jazz had become academic. When I found out that the then current generation of fans wanted to analyse, critique and show off their musical knowledge.It wasn't fun anymore, since the musicians were all classically trained and could soupt off arpeggios in 6ths and minor chords galore. And fans did the same pontificating.Jazz was originally about taking a well-known melody and making it into somrething new. It was about having fun playing with the music, instead of analysing it to death. Once the academics got to it, the music died and young people turned to rock, where the rules were not yet written in "stone". (Forgive the pun.)There's when the music truly died.
Closed AccountAug 11, 2009
I have to disagree, I took music appreciation and its not for everyone, hell it was boring. I like to draw and like art history, but I understand its not interesting to everyone else.The only thing interesting was how music, art and literature all went through very similar movements and influenced each other at times.
cjr71244Aug 12, 2009
Jazz is such a broad term, I love Miles hard bop period, steamin' cookin' I haven't found any other albums as good as those two in Jazz
ecuador108Aug 16, 2009
Who says something has to live forever, if it does it won't mean as much and go unappreciated. There is no almighty genre of music nor is there a completely rubbish genre. Take a look at classical music, there were plenty of hack composers who some of them had fifteen minutes of fame but in the grand scope of time are forgotten. I'm sure the same will be true for today's music. Everything changes but nothing ever changes.
xtombronxSep 10, 2010
Jazz can't die. I mean, I'm sure that they wrote an article in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, ect. that Jazz is dying. It's too broad of a category to fall away. There are many people who've dedicated their lives to the preservation of Jazz music, and it's being well preserved.
philparnellOct 29, 2010
Jazz is alive ... just hibernating right now.