The trumpet player Nicholas Peyton wrote a blog post recently: On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the future of the art form. If jazz is ever going to be popular again, it needs to regain its cool.
Jazz was popular when it was intimately connected to popular culture. In the early-middle part of the twentieth century, jazz was popular culture. The last significant jazz work to really communicate with pop music was “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock.
“Rockit” was informed by hip-hop and electronica, but it also gave something back — a generation of hip-hop turntablists all point to it as a central inspiration. Jazz since then has mostly tried to ignore pop culture entirely, or comment on it condescendingly.
Most jazz being produced now isn’t popular because it isn’t that good. It’s plenty complex and intellectual, but complexity isn’t coextensive with quality. People don’t listen to music to be dazzled by technique unless they’re in music school. It’s a rare contemporary jazz musician who can write a melody you’d want to hear more than once, and listening to people run difficult changes is about as interesting as watching them play video games.
In order for jazz to be popular, it needs to humble itself before the major improvisational art form of this generation: hip-hop. Jazz snobs that belittle hip-hop’s simplicity are missing the point. What hip-hop loses in harmony and melody, it more than makes up for in sonic innovation, wordplay, social realism and a sense of fun. Remember when jazz was fun? Remember when you could dance to it? Remember when it spoke to the emotional reality that most people live in? Or any emotional reality? That’s what jazz needs.
Here are two suggested directions for the future:
Verve Remixed
This series produced some excellent electronic music in its own right, brought a bunch of classic recordings to a whole new set of years, and opened a lot of jazz fans’ ears to contemporary music. Quite an achievement! I wish every jazz label would fling the vaults open to remixers, and not just the pros. I remix jazz tunes anyway, but it would be nice to have the labels’ blessing, rather than having to watch my back for lawsuits.
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/jazz-remixes/
Reggie Watts
Even though he’s supposedly a comedian, Reggie Watts comes closer to the real spirit of jazz than any contemporary jazz musician I can think of. His songs are completely improvised, but rather than sounding like free-jazz mush, they’re tightly structured, catchy and funny. Instead of trying to sound like it’s still 1959, I wish more jazz musicians could live in the present culture like Reggie does.
I think that people just don’t know what they’re missing out on when they so easily denounce some musical genres such as smooth jazz. Some people seem to only like a genre if it’s something you can dance to. While I like to dance as much as the next person, I also like the beauty and poignancy of such genres as country or soft rock; genres that play beautiful songs about life and its ups and downs. As for smooth jazz, I feel it has a calming effect on me. It has the effect to make me forget about my problems and brings me back to the present moment. I fear that such music will be lost if we don’t do all we can to appreciate it in all its forms.
I don’t think you need to fear for smooth jazz. Those guys are the only “jazz” musicians who have any meaningful presence in the marketplace. Academics don’t think much of Kenny G but he sells tons of records. Ditto country, soft rock and so on.
Ooooooookaaaay. Whew. Where to start?
As usual, fascinating. A lot to think about. This is sort of an unstructured rant — hopefully it makes some kind of sense.
As a jazz musician, and someone who loves jazz profoundly as an art form, I occasionally lapse into despair over the state of the genre. There are good reasons for this despair, to be sure. But my melancholy moods are, really, only occasional. Because the rest of the time I’m too busy listening to exciting music, and trying to make some of my own.
It is certainly true that as jazz evolved over the 20th Century it became more abstract, broadly speaking more technical, less impressionistic and less concerned with melody and song form — the elements that tend to make music immediately palatable, danceable and amenable to mass commercial appeal. In doing so, jazz became a truly deep art music — music whose scope and ambition rivals classical music and literature and fine art; music that is theoretically capable of discoursing on anything in the spectrum of human experience. (My definition of what separates Art Music from Pop Music.)
There is no doubt that this evolution also alienated a large part of the audience that made jazz commercially viable in the first half of the century, a trajectory that classical music went through a little more slowly between the second half of the 19th Century through to today.
Now, part of the premise of these kinds of conversations is that to some degree, things could “go back” to the way they were. I find that highly questionable. The popularity of jazz didn’t decline in a vacuum. At the same time that jazz was changing, rock and motown and any number of other forms were becoming wildly popular. Even if jazz had frozen itself in the Glenn Miller era, would it have been able to compete with the British Invasion? I doubt it.
But I think there’s a larger point — the one that is most at odds with your essay. You seem to be proffering two solutions to jazz’s marginalization. That jazz needs to be more “in the moment” which I read as: needing to connect on a human level with people’s emotions and with the concerns of the present moment— we’ll call that “cultural relevance.” And that it needs to be artistically simpler — less technical.
In terms of cultural relevance, I agree with you completely. Jesse claims that jazz split in two in the ’70s. I’d say maybe in three, and put the “start” date in the ’60s. I think the taxonomy is something like: nostalgia-soaked, reflexively-anachronistic Wynton-style capital-J jazz; fusion & smooth “jazz,” and Free Jazz. And each of these branches is problematic in its own way. But to be sure, none are “culturally relevant.”
But lets look back for a second. In the ’60s, you had very topical, artistically unimpeachable jazz that dealt with, for example, civil rights — the Freedom Now! suite, lots of Mingus. And it was hardly a mass-market breakthrough, even in the black community. Not because there was anything wrong the music — it’s just that cultural tastes had switched genres. In order for Fable of Faubus to compete with Sly Stone, Mingus would have to had played electric bass over a funk beat and hired a singer…. Squeezed himself into leather pants… And then it wouldn’t be jazz, would it?
My point here is simply that I think the train left the station a long time ago on the jazz form being “where its at” with The Kids. Nothing we do that is still recognizably jazz in any way is going to be Pop-popular because Kreayshawn exists to fill that hole. Why the fuck do you need Wycliffe Gordon when you have Nicki Minaj? You just don’t.
And I mean, you talk about learning from hip-hop, but which hip-hop? It’s funny that you cite Rockit. Partly cuz I don’t particularly think of it as jazz in any way. But mostly because it’s SO DATED! Many hip-hop aficionados already think the form is dead because of people like Kanye and Ms. Minaj. The Kids have barely heard of Tribe and De La Soul and Black Star. And even by then, I don’t think a lot of teenagers were bumping Funky Four Plus One on their Discmen. Their tastes having already moved on from the hit artists of 8 years ago, I don’t think your target demographic is gonna be fooled when I sneak Funky Drummer under Blue Monk and rush to the stores. Tastes change, and when they do, there is rarely any going back. (You think ragtime and vaudeville are due for a Reggie Watts makeover any time soon?)
Now what about jazz’s off-putting technicality? In some ways, this is where the rubber meets the road. And I agree completely that this is a large part of what marginalizes jazz. And you know what? Good. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Forget the last three hundred years of western music? There’s an old, yellowed cartoon stuck to my fridge from the waning days of the 2000 presidential race. In it, Al Gore’s aides are trying to get him wasted in preparation for his debate with George W. Bush. But Gore tells them that unfortunately he “still feels smart” and race to get a bong. Whatever Al Gore’s loss to Bush tells us about the sad state of America, would you rather the Democrats found someone just as chickenshit dumb and ran them?
I don’t want to get in a race to the bottom with Lady Gaga. Because, a) I’ll lose. And b) along the way I’ll lose everything that made me believe in jazz in the first place. The ability of music to be as complex and challenging as literature. To ask a lot of its audience and give back as much and more. To be ambitious enough to address the full breadth of human experience.
Somebody has to do it.
Right?
Isn’t that what it means to be an artist working with limited financial reward? That you get to talk about things that the commercial marketplace just isn’t interested in? And don’t we need that in a big, big way as a culture? To BE a culture? It’s the same argument for why we need basic science research, not just corporate R&D departments. Yeah, it’s good to have iPhones (triple-platinum albums) but don’t we also need Large Hadron Colliders and Hubbles. Because they tell us what it means to live in the universe and be human. Because, while a Hubble photo of a distant galaxy has no commercial value whatsoever, it gives little kids shivers down their spines and makes them excited to live somewhere vast and mysterious instead of small and reasonably-priced. Which is exactly the feeling I get when I listen to Coltrane Live at Birdland.
I mean, speaking not just as a drummer but as someone who deeply loves swing — that’s the first thing to go. All the examples that you have up there involve a drum machine or something playing a straight beat. And due (mad) respect, so do all of your remixes. Well, sorry but I fucking love swing. And I love the one art form — the one that invented drumming, btw — where the drummer is an equal artist because that’s my goddamn instrument, lol. So the very first thing that would have to happen in your new paradigm is that I retire. Paul Motian is turning in his freshly-dug grave.
And hey, I love Reggie Watts too. But he’s a comedian singing funny novelty songs. Maybe if I started doing a “Capital Steps” routine I could be huge with 55-and-over NPR junkie crowd. But, I mean come on! We’re talking about the art form that gave you Round Midnight and West End Blues and Black, Brown & Beige and A Love Supreme. So sit down at the table with Monk and Trane and Duke and Louis and explain what it is they don’t get that Reggie Watts can show them. And look, I know you’re talking about today’s artists, not the giant of yesteryear. But it’s not as if The Kids are listening to Duke or Monk either, right? It’s not about the quality, it’s about the zeitgeist. And of course the filter of time. I mean, there were plenty of lesser contemporaries of those people I just cited who time has forgotten. We may be awash in irrelevant, mediocre jazz right now, but maybe in 50 years this will be remembered as the age of Ambrose Akinmusire and John Hollenbeck and everything else will be glossed over. I dunno.
There’s a lot of bad jazz out there. There’s a lot of showing off and running lines. Or on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of navel-gazing unlistenable free-jazz. But there is also extraordinarily beautiful music that operates at a very human scale being made. And in these cases the technical is simply a part of what makes this music special. I mean, do you want to go back in time and edit the trumpet cadenza out of “West End Blues?” I’d hope not, right? It just comes back to there being good art and bad art. Look at classical music. Work that is intentionally alienating like Berg or Xanakis has less relevance and less commercial viability over time. But no one complains that Chopin is too technical. Or that Bach’s counterpoint is too dense. Because the technical ability is so interwoven with making beautiful, resonant music.
Now look, I actually totally agree that when you say, “What hip-hop loses in harmony and melody, it more than makes up for in sonic innovation, wordplay, social realism and a sense of fun. Remember when jazz was fun? Remember when you could dance to it? Remember when it spoke to the emotional reality that most people live in? Or any emotional reality? That’s what jazz needs.”
I think these things are lacking in all of the bad jazz out there, and are present in one form or another in all of the good stuff. But we’re talking about instrumental music. It will never be popular the way hip-hop is cuz there’s no words to hand you your fun and relevance on a silver platter. And unless our culture does a 180, I don’t see folks dancing to swing music anytime soon.
I guess this indicates that there may simply be a (negative) feedback loop here as well. In other words, as long as jazz declines in popularity, the harder it becomes for it to feel relevant because elements like swing and the blues become more and more associated with nostalgia and the past. So that even if I composed a jazz opera about the life of Drake, it would still feel anachronistic. I dunno. But I’m not ready to chuck swing and the blues under the bus.
This is a whole other topic, but I think that there’s a race issue here too. Part of what I think happened with hip-hop is that it started, like jazz, as a “folk art” form. But then as it matured into the ’90s it started to become, like jazz, a serious art form that was intellectually demanding and challenging. But then, where jazz more or less kinda-sorta rejected mainstream appeal and became a more and more complex art form, hip-hop went corporate. It “sold out.” Hence “hip-hop is dead.” And there’s a big artistic implication from that. But also a racial one. Because there was always a tension in hip-hop between the genre as a dialog between black people — a safe (ish) space with a lot of room to maneuver and experiment and occupy different identities. And hip-hop as a form of entertainment for white people. In which you tend to want either very assimilated black people, or (frankly more often) blacks-as-cartoons. Blacks playing to type, cast as hilariously savage, thuggish stereotypes in white America’s racial imaginings. Think ODB or 50 Cent or Snoop or Odd Future. Or Lil Kim. Etc.
Jazz has always occupied a complicated racial space in terms of its place in the black community, and in dialog with white folk. But one thing it stopped doing a long time ago was serving-up cartoon black people. So again, I just don’t see us competing there.
I think that for better or for worse jazz’s future will be tied to the attention span and artistic, racial and cultural curiosity of the American people. (I know, I know — kill myself now, right?) Much like classical music, it will have to survive in the margins, for people who want something bigger from music than whatever is on the iTunes splash page. That’s just all there is to it. For jazz to have any hope of sustaining long-term potential it will HAVE to work very hard at connecting emotionally and culturally with its audience, just as you suggest. It will have to speak to “the emotional reality that most people live in,” not a retro fantasy or to an audience of black-turtle-necked grad students.
But in order to have integrity, it can’t go chasing the nakedly commercial any more than any other music can. Unless you’re just chasing one-hit wonder status, you have to work from a more personal place. And accept that what you make just might not appeal to the masses. I have no idea whether I’ll ever be able to make a living making my music. But I’d rather aim for the first thirty years of Miles Davis’s career than the last twenty. Don’t you think?
It’s not that Reggie Watts has anything to teach Monk or Duke, but I think he has a lot to teach Jason Moran and the Marsalises. Reggie is doing free improvisation in a way that puts asses in the seats. If Monk were alive, I bet he’d be getting a lot more inspiration from Reggie than Wynton right now.
I don’t think jazz needs to dumb down. I think it needs to get smarter, leaner and meaner. I’d like to see more effort put into editing, focus and musical economy. I’d like to hear the cats reject 9/10s of their ideas, drill down to the really powerful ones, repeat and develop them in a structured way that any reasonably bright person could follow. And I’d like to hear more of an effort to keep up with technology. Finding yet another slight variation on “All The Things You Are” is
lazy. Trying to find jazz language to engage with “Da Mystery Of
Chessboxin'” would require some real artistic risk-taking.
Jazz had its share of cartoons and racial stereotypes. Even Dizzy played the fool. And it’s not fair to compare Kreay$hawn to Wycliffe Gordon. She’s more accurately compared to cats walking the bar and playing corny R&B. A better comparison to Wycliffe would be Janelle Monae or Mos Def.
There’s plenty of racial and cultural curiosity in America. We made stars of Björk and MIA. They represent what I would hope for jazz: personal, idiosyncratic music that keeps in a close enough dialog with what’s going on in the larger world to be able to get the message out.
The problem with Miles’ last twenty years wasn’t his direction or ideas; it was the execution. I hear plenty of stuff on Doo-Bop that I could really get behind if he hadn’t been a sickly drug addict in only partial possession of his marbles. Miles was right to get behind “Human Nature” and “Time After Time” even if his renditions were terrible. Cassandra Wilson’s version of “Time After Time” inspired by his example is maybe the best jazz vocal recording of my lifetime.
I think that drilling down and focussing and musical economy, etc. are things that any weak musician could stand to do in order to improve her or his art. But I don’t think that this is a particular problem of jazz, or that by doing that, jazz would stand much of a chance of becoming more commercially viable. It’s funny that you give Jason Moran and Wynton Marsalis as examples of people who could learn from Reggie Watts. Because actually I think that they are, in their own very different ways, making some of the best jazz that’s out there. Jazz that can stand up against anything from the past and hold it’s own. And yet they each also demonstrate the limits of what you’re discussing. Jason Moran loves hip-hop, is super engaged with creating very contemporary, non-nostalgic jazz. But he is a serious artist making complicated, personal work that is idiosyncratic and, again, instrumental. When he discourses musically on hip-hop, it just isn’t going to present in an obvious way. When Jeremiah wants to talk about having sex with you on your birthday, he writes a song called, “Birthday Sex.” And proposes to have sex with you. On your birthday. When John Coltrane wants to talk about civil rights and tragedy, he writes “Alabama.” If it weren’t titled, “Alabama” you’d have no idea it was relevant to anything. When Jason Moran wants to talk about hip-hop, it sounds like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrYz6NRiBs
or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x6prMAgKgE&feature=related
That’s brilliant, brilliant jazz that engages in a profound way with everything from hip-hop to stride piano. But any obvious textual meaning is highly abstracted. And that’s just the way this art form works. It’s an artistic strength and a commercial weakness. But there’s nothing to be done about it that doesn’t constitute “dumbing down.”
Likewise, Wynton. I mean, for better or worse, here’s someone who composes tight, highly memorable melodies and doesn’t do anything by accident. Take this tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa2TDwFpixo
It couldn’t be simpler. The entire melody is based on repetition of a really, really simply line. The changes are just a vamp. It swings at a tempo that you could easily dance to if you wanted to. Heck, the entire piece is actually a cinematic narrative composed for a movie soundtrack. But as I keep pointing out, The Kids aren’t rushing out for this shit. Maybe he could put a drum machine behind and people would like it more. Maybe. But then it wouldn’t swing and it wouldn’t really be jazz. Or at least not interesting jazz.
Or this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EL45UmMxNY
Nobody’s running lines or serving up tired cliches. But it’s a JAZZ BALLAD! Nobody under the age of 40 gives a shit. That’s just what it is.
And it doesn’t need to be fixed. I mean, I’m sorry to harsh but remixing Carmen McRae into some tired acid jazz garbage? This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPzIh-Z4CuI&feature=related
isn’t broken. There is nothing there that a drum machine will fix. Clearly, that isn’t a prejudice against drum machines and electronic music on my part. I love that music. But it’s not this music. You — and audiences everywhere — can engage with this music on its own terms or not. “A Clockwork Orange” aside, we don’t need more “Switched-On Bach” or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNXh1O6OH08
To be clear, again — that doesn’t mean not being contemporary or engaging with the culture as it is. I am all for Brad Mehldau covering Radiohead and everything the Bad Plus ever did. And Vijay Iyer doing MIA. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOBhrnOzwXw) Or Jason Moran’s Bjork covers.
I think that’s great. That’s what I want to do with my music. But I also need space for Big Ideas. I think small ideas are great. I think small ideas can be extraordinarily powerful when communicated right. I love a good love song. I love a good hook. I believe in the power of dancing. Really — I think that writing something that makes people want to get up and dance is an amazing, deeply non-trivial thing. But I want to live in a world with room for big ideas too. I think that they are necessary for the soul; an utterly vital tool for processing the huge complicated landscape of the world and the psyche. And I don’t want jazz that can only do the former. I mean, think about it — when jazz was popular music, tons of it was frankly crappy. You want Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller and Harry James back? Blergh. The reason that jazz got complicated was that none of the musicians wanted to play that shit any more.
Which suggests that part of the problem with your thesis is that it’s top-down. You couldn’t go back in time to 1955 and tell Trane, “you should be playing soprano over modal forms and using huge chromatic, polymetric clusters. People will love that shit.” It just doesn’t work like that. He had to come to it on his own, in his own time and out of his own musical curiosity. And then it had to come on the scene at a moment when audiences were ready. Etc. These things can’t be planned. Right now, somewhere out there, there’s a 15-year old kid listening to his iPod on shuffle, bouncing between Monk and Kanye, and sitting at a piano playing along to all of it. And one day he’ll bust out with some crazy shit that all of us will flock to. That’s the only way this is gonna happen — not through internet reprobation to the jazz community.
When I compared Wycliffe to Kreayshawn I didn’t mean in terms of quality, I meant it in terms of what space they fill in the masses demand for media. In that regard, Wycliffe isn’t a Mos Def or a Janelle — he’s not even a singing dog on youtube or a cell phone ringtone. No one needs him. At all. And yet he’s one of the most skilled, soulful musicians of the last twenty years. He could release an album of trombone fart noises and it would find more purchase in the cultural imagination. But we’d be poorer for it. And it wouldn’t reflect on him making better choices, it would reflect on us making crappier ones.
I guess I’m just a bit of an elitist. I don’t particularly respect America’s cultural predilections or intuitions any more than I respect our political ones. I don’t want Direct Democracy. We are too politically ignorant to be trusted with that shit. And our artistic tastes are no different. That doesn’t mean there isn’t good popular music. But, again, it’s a shallow pool. I may be part of a small and shrinking market, but I want the good stuff. I believe in the good stuff.
And as for Da Mystery of Chessboxin… I think it really depends on your definition of risk-taking. It’s true that it takes some courage to break with artistic orthodoxy and genre dogma. But I find it hard to look at a generation of musicians who can barely pay their meager rents and accuse them of not taking risks for their art. And if your point is that by copping hip-hop tropes, they could all make more money — one could easily describe that as the less risky route. They still might be making mostly bad art. But they’re putting a lot on the line to do it. And, by the law of artistic averages — if two dozen jazz tributes to Wu-Tang dropped tomorrow, wouldn’t most of them suck?
I totally disagree about Miles’s last twenty years. I think the execution AND the ideas sucked. Miles being junked out of his skull never stopped him from making great music before, lol. But really — it just wasn’t ever going to work conceptually. Because Miles wasn’t trying to have a jazz band covering pop tunes — he wanted a pop band, period. He wanted, desperately to be making music dumb enough for The Kids to like. And he succeeded brilliantly in figuring out what it would sound like for a shitty pop band to play pop tunes with a jazz trumpeter soloing over them. And guess what? It’s not worth listening to. Mostly just cuz it’s boring as all hell.
As for racial and cultural curiosity in America — I think that’s super complicated. With regard to Bjork and MIA, my point is not that artists of color or foreigners can’t sell a lot of albums in America. It’s a question of, on whose terms? What aspects of an artist’s identity or message make it through to the masses and stick and are taken seriously. Look at Martin Luther King, Jr. for a moment. Here’s a guy who couldn’t have been more explicit about his beliefs, or more well documented in his lifetime. And yet our society has completely re-written his history and re-imagined him into another person after his death. We have extracted the feel-good parts of his politics and created someone so declawed and deracinated that Barack Obama, Jessie Helms, Al Sharpton and Michele Bachmann can all claim him as an inspiration and an American hero.
This process most certainly happens in music, in many different ways. When white kids listen to NWA or Public Enemy, what do you think they’re taking from it? Are they taking it in its fullness? Clearly not. When a pop song with a vaguely-arab-sounding instrument becomes a hit, what does that represent about America’s engagement with… well, anything? By and large, people want their art delivered in a form that is very, very safe. Commodification helps with that. Context. Appropriation and assimilation. Hip-hop used to be A CULTURE. A real, honest-to-god culture that came out of a real community, defined by geography and creative individual who made things: music, art, clothing, language, events. For themselves and other members of their community. And then commerce got ahold of it, and hip-hop became something that you could buy. That anyone could buy. Fashion with a capital “F.” Music that white kids in the suburbs could listen to in order to feel rebellious/unique/real-er. Whatever. Without ever having to engage in any serious way with the culture that produced it. People love Marvin Gaye on a movie soundtrack. How many white people are listening to “Inner City Blues” and thinking about their own complicity in racism? Or about what Marvin Gaye probably thought of them and their safe little middle class soccer-mom lives?
Jazz went through the same meat-grinder. Set to different settings for a different time. But when you hear a saxophone solo filter up out of the tv the moment a sex scene starts…? That’s pretty much what’s left of jazz in the popular imagination. Black people are great for making sex music.
This is not a problem that most white pop music has to deal with in western culture, because for the most part, white music is not representational in a cultural context. No one listens to, say, Bonnie Rait and thinks that she represents white people in any way. No one puts U2 on a movie sound track to represent anything. Classical music get this treatment to some degree — it’s used to represent “classy.” High culture. But then we give them millions of dollars in grants by way of penance. “Sorry that we’re too dumb to understand your music. Here’s a million dollars.” Not so with jazz.
What’s interesting with all of this discussion is how much the process of doing it has made me much more bullish about jazz. The process of defending it, and then listening to all these clips of Jason Moran and Wynton and Vijay Iyer. It’s made me realize how little the actual music needs defending. As long as there are people making shit as exciting as that? I don’t know whether there will be a mass audience for this stuff anytime soon. But I’ll be there. Only too happy to put my $5 in the hat to pay back these guys, playing their asses off to make beautiful music. To swing. To do what jazz musicians have been doing since day one — having a dialog, through music, with my old soul.
Actually, my “institutionalized” comment was unfair. There are also self-sustaining local scenes with varying degrees of traditionalism and varying degrees of interaction with other genres of music. Here in Baltimore, for example, you can hear jazz mixed with go-go; and New Orleans, of course, is a topic unto itself.
My broad and oversimplified feeling about the state of jazz is that it split in two in the 1970s. On one side you had Jazz-with-a-capital-J, which became institutionalized in such a way that guaranteed it wasn’t going to evolve much more. Yes, you can point to various folks who have done innovative things since then, but I feel like fusion was the last subgenre to (a) feel like a new development, and (b) become a part of what we all think of as a recognizably “jazz” sound.
But at the same time, jazz kept influencing the rest of pop. While those first fusion records were coming out, you could hear strong strains of jazz in the music of figures as different as Willie Nelson and Stevie Wonder. Funk overlapped with jazz in much the same way that swing did in the ’30s and ’40s, and then carried what it learned from jazz into new genres. Samplers borrowed from jazz and jazzy records. On the more experimental side, noise musicians built on the ideas of the most radical jazz improvisers. Those currents kept moving forward, kept feeling lively. But we don’t usually think of them as “jazz,” although the difference between them and the jazz of earlier generations wasn’t necessarily any greater than the difference between Jelly Roll Morton and Weather Report.
I’m not sure Jazz-with-a-capital-J can be revitalized. It’s the sort of institution that subsists on grants. But the larger jazz diaspora is still evolving.
[I will leave it to someone else to make an argument about how “smooth jazz” fits into this scheme.]
The “jazz diaspora” is a nice phrase. It’s true that most people who get jazz training (like me) go on to use it for non-jazz music: pop, rock, country, hip-hop, electronica. Jazz is a much better framework for understanding all that music than classical.
I might have written off smooth jazz as a creative dead end, but as I started looking into hip-hop sampling I was startling to see how heavily producers rely on corny fuzak. For every sample of “real” jazz, there are like fifty of Creed Taylor seventies records. I guess that makes sense; the production value in the Creed Taylor stuff is much better than the classic stuff, and it’s easy to find two hot bars in an otherwise lame song to build a track around.