Thumbing through the National Post, I came across a reprint of a Boston Globe article on jazz. (Odd, borrowing from a newspaper the Aspers don't own -- don't they control enough writers? Oh, never mind.)

It turned out to be a handwringer over the decline of the genre, entitled Jazz Industry Singing the Blues. Its author cited low CD sales, distribution problems, the public preference for dead players over live ones and the consequent lack of living jazz stars other than Diana Krall and Wynton Marsalis. (Whose choices of repertoire tend to favour the dead over the living in any case.)

The article concluded that the jazz industry may or may not be dead, but it's ready for the ICU.

I've become inured to the term Music Biz, not to mention Ottawa's odious Cultural Industries, but this was the first time I'd encountered jazz industry, and I wondered what Dizzy Gillespie would have thought. But of course no "industry" would have hired Dizzy in the first place, whose cheeks puffed unattractively while playing to the extent that he resembled something out of the depths of the sea. Same with Parker, Coltrane and Monk, whose drug histories would have made them poor investments (no role models there), not to mention their disregard for listener profiles and focus groups.

A fundamental assumption of industrial culture, it seems to me, is that success is not a function of individual personalities on the front line, but of the way individuals are managed from upstairs: selected, trained, assigned to the area in which their talents are best suited, inspired by the company vision statement and provided with the proper feedback to maximize performance.

Inspired musicians are not amenable to this approach. On what basis would any industry executive in his right mind sign a nasty piece of work like Miles Davis, with more co-operative, consistent, manageable talents in the waiting room?

And an industry is not an industry without a physical plant. Thus we find ourselves saddled with the contemporary recording studio, in which it is possible to manipulate what is played in an almost infinite number of ways, thereby producing a triumph of seamless engineering in which the physical skill of the player and the acrobatic magic of improvisation become irrelevant.

"Mistakes are part of the music," said Davis. Another time he told a player, "I don't want to hear what you know, I want to hear what you don't know."

Can you imagine this directive coming from a contemporary bandleader, in charge of a session under contract with Sony?

Another aspect of the industrial paradigm (forgive me) is the assumption that a product is something that serves a specific purpose. Hence, contemporary movies are to entertain, while paintings exist for their potential as investments.

As a result, movies have become virtual amusement parks, while the art scene has become a form of stock promotion, in which the value is rarely a function of what the producer produces. (Perhaps Enron, which seems to have produced nothing, should be regarded as a work of performance art.)

In the "music industry," value derives from the fact that, unlike in the visual and written arts, it is possible to listen to music and do something else at the same time. The utility and value of music derives from its ability to enhance or distract from another activity -- driving, eating, exercising, various kinds of seduction and, of course, shopping. Most contemporary CDs were never intended to be heard on their own, but as soundtracks to ornament somebody's life.

In the industrial model, to listen to music for its own sake would be like sitting in a chair and examining the wallpaper. (I wonder what Davis would have thought of Dinner Jazz, a compilation in which he joins David Sanborne and Kenny G. in serenading your pasta.)

But perhaps the market's antipathy to jazz goes deeper. As an expression of modernism (meaning, to embrace the future without knowing where you're going), jazz is in fundamental conflict with a culture focused on fear: of the unknown, of the future, of being confused, of being taken in, of letting go, of missing out. An age of desperate channel-surfing for familiar imagery, in which we don't watch a show, we watch TV; in which the adjective "new" is no compliment.

Nor is the adjective "complicated."

As with any art (or idea or organism or society), jazz tends in the direction of complexity. The ear, whether it belongs to a player, composer or listener, wants to stay interested -- even at the price of confusion, of hearing something it doesn't quite follow. places the ear in conflict with the current dogma, in which simple is good and complex is elitist; in which anyone who bothers to attain a skill for any reason other than to compete is a self-indulgent pseud.

That's not how listeners saw things in 1965. Hence, the demand for Davis and Coltrane: In the baby-boomer market, these names function as brands representing the last time they took music seriously. The last time they listened to a piece twice before they "got" it, while their parents headed to the symphony for their yearly doses of Brahms.
jmgray@globeandmail.ca