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THE FALL OF JAZZ
[From a great profile of pianist Billy Taylor]
WELLS TOWER, WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE - One of jazz's bestselling
albums, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," hit the charts in 1959, and the
four decades that followed would witness the music's fitful recession
from mainstream listenership. With a handful of notable exceptions,
instrumental jazz failed to win back audiences that had started to stray
at the onset of the bop era. Riven by new categories -- free jazz,
Latin, fusion, acid jazz, smooth jazz -- consensus as to what jazz was
or wasn't began to disintegrate. Even the music's most commercially
successful incarnation in years, smooth jazz, posed an artistic
quandary. A heavily pasteurized, atmospheric music that favored
listener-friendly melodies over improvisatory prowess, smooth jazz, in
the 1980s, revived the music's presence on mainstream radio. But the
hard-core jazz establishment largely dismissed the new genre as a
commercial abomination. In 1992, saxophonist Kenny G lofted smooth jazz
into the Top 40 with "Breathless," which, with sales of more than 15
million copies, is the bestselling instrumental album in recording
history. Yet no one has deplored his success more venomously than the
jazz community. "You're in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Kenny G, and
you've got a gun with only two bullets. What do you do?" asks a bitter
joke circulating widely on jazz chat sites. "Shoot Kenny G twice."
As the decades passed, jazz's star-making machinery slipped into
disrepair. Record companies signed fewer artists, and though New York
clubs such as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Iridium still
thrive today, jazz clubs in the rest of America have undergone a massive
die-off. . .
By the early '90s, with the exception of smooth jazz, the music had all
but vanished from American commercial radio. But it found new allies in
august venues such as the Kennedy Center, which in 1994 brought in
[Billy] Taylor as artistic adviser to help launch its fledgling jazz
program. . .
Though jazz vocalists such as Harry Connick Jr., Cassandra Wilson and
Diana Krall still sell records in pop quantities, the market continues
to be frosty for instrumental stars. These days, even Marsalis, the only
household name to emerge from the jazz world in the last
quarter-century, is far from commercial viability as a recording artist.
Of the dozen records he recorded in the 1990s, none logged sales over
15,000 units.
In 2001, Burns's documentary series "Jazz" inspired a rash of CD
releases, with Burns hoping to catch an updraft in sales from this piece
of rare publicity. But the documentary, which, to the disappointment of
the contemporary jazz scene, chronicled only the music's early history
and basically ignored the present, didn't do much to buoy sales of new
releases. By 2005, America's classical music would barely register a
pulse with the record-buying public. With sales at 1.8 percent of market
share, jazz was outstripped not only by traditional classical
recordings, which were trickling off the shelves at 2.4 percent, but
even by children's music, whose sales beat out jazz by 0.5 percentage
points, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2007/05/09/AR2007050901774_pf.html
MORE ARTS NEWS
http://prorev.com/arts.htm
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THE FALL OF JAZZ
[From a great profile of pianist Billy Taylor]
WELLS TOWER, WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE - One of jazz's bestselling
albums, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," hit the charts in 1959, and the
four decades that followed would witness the music's fitful recession
from mainstream listenership. With a handful of notable exceptions,
instrumental jazz failed to win back audiences that had started to stray
at the onset of the bop era. Riven by new categories -- free jazz,
Latin, fusion, acid jazz, smooth jazz -- consensus as to what jazz was
or wasn't began to disintegrate. Even the music's most commercially
successful incarnation in years, smooth jazz, posed an artistic
quandary. A heavily pasteurized, atmospheric music that favored
listener-friendly melodies over improvisatory prowess, smooth jazz, in
the 1980s, revived the music's presence on mainstream radio. But the
hard-core jazz establishment largely dismissed the new genre as a
commercial abomination. In 1992, saxophonist Kenny G lofted smooth jazz
into the Top 40 with "Breathless," which, with sales of more than 15
million copies, is the bestselling instrumental album in recording
history. Yet no one has deplored his success more venomously than the
jazz community. "You're in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Kenny G, and
you've got a gun with only two bullets. What do you do?" asks a bitter
joke circulating widely on jazz chat sites. "Shoot Kenny G twice."
As the decades passed, jazz's star-making machinery slipped into
disrepair. Record companies signed fewer artists, and though New York
clubs such as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Iridium still
thrive today, jazz clubs in the rest of America have undergone a massive
die-off. . .
By the early '90s, with the exception of smooth jazz, the music had all
but vanished from American commercial radio. But it found new allies in
august venues such as the Kennedy Center, which in 1994 brought in
[Billy] Taylor as artistic adviser to help launch its fledgling jazz
program. . .
Though jazz vocalists such as Harry Connick Jr., Cassandra Wilson and
Diana Krall still sell records in pop quantities, the market continues
to be frosty for instrumental stars. These days, even Marsalis, the only
household name to emerge from the jazz world in the last
quarter-century, is far from commercial viability as a recording artist.
Of the dozen records he recorded in the 1990s, none logged sales over
15,000 units.
In 2001, Burns's documentary series "Jazz" inspired a rash of CD
releases, with Burns hoping to catch an updraft in sales from this piece
of rare publicity. But the documentary, which, to the disappointment of
the contemporary jazz scene, chronicled only the music's early history
and basically ignored the present, didn't do much to buoy sales of new
releases. By 2005, America's classical music would barely register a
pulse with the record-buying public. With sales at 1.8 percent of market
share, jazz was outstripped not only by traditional classical
recordings, which were trickling off the shelves at 2.4 percent, but
even by children's music, whose sales beat out jazz by 0.5 percentage
points, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2007/05/09/AR2007050901774_pf.html
MORE ARTS NEWS
http://prorev.com/arts.htm
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