Jazz is commercially in a bad way
The decision by EMI's storied jazz label Blue Note to release its back catalogue as 30-second ring tones for mobile phones smacks to me of desperation. These days, jazz is commercially in a bad way, shrinking to such a small part of the musical pie that it isn't a wedge but a line. In the US, where jazz was born, the genre's market share dipped from its already meagre 3.5% to 1.8% last year.
Sure, there's no harm done in selling snippets of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to alert you to the fact that your mother's ringing again. And ring tones do represent one of the only growing markets in the ailing music industry. So fair play to Blue Note if the label can bring in some extra dosh and also allow the few jazz fans left in the world to publicly proclaim their tastes on commuter trains. Nevertheless, the larger picture is depressing.
The heyday of jazz is still regarded as the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, and it has never shed its retro aura - like those hand-drawn Horlicks labels - and so seems a remnant of the past, rather than a living contemporary art form. Yet to some degree, jazz practitioners have marginalised themselves. As a jazz fan, I know how difficult it is to wheedle many of my friends into coming with me to clubs. "Mmm," I get back queasily. "It's not going to be, you know ..." And then they do a cacophonous imitation that sounds a cross between a phonograph needle screeching across an LP and a birthing cow.
"Free jazz" - unstructured, often atonal and unmelodiously improvised - has done a disservice to the fan base. (I'm convinced that, while it may be fun to play, even most jazz musicians can't stand to listen to it.) The same perverse obliviousness to what an audience really wants that has alienated so many would-be viewers from modern art has also infected some jazz musicians, who are implicitly contemptuous of the very people they expect to support them. That audience is not necessarily unsophisticated. Still, the yearning for tune, order, and harmony may be as universal as the related appetite for coherent narrative - for story. Novelists who spurn the fictional equivalent of the tune - plot - are punished commercially as well.
Yet there are many jazz musicians today, playing at a club near you, whose music is accessible, tuneful, and tap-your-foot rhythmic. In the UK, consider the transporting singer Christine Tobin, accompanied by soulful guitarist Phil Robson, the reflective pianist Barry Green, or mellifluous saxophonists such as Bobby Wellins, Martin Speake and Ingrid Laubrock. And they all play for longer than 30 seconds.
Lionel Shriverin writing in the Guardian. If you do desperation you may also like to try a Superman ringtone from the London Symphony Orchestra's website.
Now playing - Not a trace of desperation in Joanna MacGregor (piano/keyboards) and Andy Sheppard's (saxophone) Deep River. Inspired by her many trips to the American Deep South, this music also has deeply personal connotations, going right back to Joanna's childhood and a father who was a lay preacher in an Evangelical church. After a close musical partnership with Andy Sheppard for many years, this is their first long-awaited duo recording. We hear both the purity of the acoustic duo as well as the subtle use of multi-tracking and samples. The use of the original 1927 recording of William and Versey Smith's song Everybody Help the Boys Come Home creates a fantastic groove - which also inflects the tune with the atmospheric static of early recordings. When this tune re-appears as a remix by a different producer, the gravity of the lyrics is brought home by a far darker treatment with layers of drums, disturbing incoherent vocal samples and dissonant layers of electronics. Is it free jazz, is it contemporary music, is it World Music, does it matter? Just beautiful, follow this link for an audio file.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Google loves jazz
Sure, there's no harm done in selling snippets of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to alert you to the fact that your mother's ringing again. And ring tones do represent one of the only growing markets in the ailing music industry. So fair play to Blue Note if the label can bring in some extra dosh and also allow the few jazz fans left in the world to publicly proclaim their tastes on commuter trains. Nevertheless, the larger picture is depressing.
The heyday of jazz is still regarded as the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, and it has never shed its retro aura - like those hand-drawn Horlicks labels - and so seems a remnant of the past, rather than a living contemporary art form. Yet to some degree, jazz practitioners have marginalised themselves. As a jazz fan, I know how difficult it is to wheedle many of my friends into coming with me to clubs. "Mmm," I get back queasily. "It's not going to be, you know ..." And then they do a cacophonous imitation that sounds a cross between a phonograph needle screeching across an LP and a birthing cow.
"Free jazz" - unstructured, often atonal and unmelodiously improvised - has done a disservice to the fan base. (I'm convinced that, while it may be fun to play, even most jazz musicians can't stand to listen to it.) The same perverse obliviousness to what an audience really wants that has alienated so many would-be viewers from modern art has also infected some jazz musicians, who are implicitly contemptuous of the very people they expect to support them. That audience is not necessarily unsophisticated. Still, the yearning for tune, order, and harmony may be as universal as the related appetite for coherent narrative - for story. Novelists who spurn the fictional equivalent of the tune - plot - are punished commercially as well.
Yet there are many jazz musicians today, playing at a club near you, whose music is accessible, tuneful, and tap-your-foot rhythmic. In the UK, consider the transporting singer Christine Tobin, accompanied by soulful guitarist Phil Robson, the reflective pianist Barry Green, or mellifluous saxophonists such as Bobby Wellins, Martin Speake and Ingrid Laubrock. And they all play for longer than 30 seconds.
Lionel Shriverin writing in the Guardian. If you do desperation you may also like to try a Superman ringtone from the London Symphony Orchestra's website.
Now playing - Not a trace of desperation in Joanna MacGregor (piano/keyboards) and Andy Sheppard's (saxophone) Deep River. Inspired by her many trips to the American Deep South, this music also has deeply personal connotations, going right back to Joanna's childhood and a father who was a lay preacher in an Evangelical church. After a close musical partnership with Andy Sheppard for many years, this is their first long-awaited duo recording. We hear both the purity of the acoustic duo as well as the subtle use of multi-tracking and samples. The use of the original 1927 recording of William and Versey Smith's song Everybody Help the Boys Come Home creates a fantastic groove - which also inflects the tune with the atmospheric static of early recordings. When this tune re-appears as a remix by a different producer, the gravity of the lyrics is brought home by a far darker treatment with layers of drums, disturbing incoherent vocal samples and dissonant layers of electronics. Is it free jazz, is it contemporary music, is it World Music, does it matter? Just beautiful, follow this link for an audio file.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Google loves jazz
Comments
However I must disagree with selling ringtones smacking of desperation: I'm amazed, given jazz's small American market share, that it hadn't been done sooner.