Better late than never, I’m linking to Patrick J’s two responses to Terry Teachout’s dire forecast in The Wall Street Journal on the health of the jazz audience. I’ll just recap and elaborate what I wrote in Patrick’s comments section:
Big duh, Mr. Teachout. We all know the jazz audience will never rival the arena rock audience. As John Seabrook’s New Yorker piece on Live Nation reminds us, even the music industry titans can no longer count on selling as big as they’d like. It’s all relative. But evidence of jazz’s health is everywhere if you’d care to look. Throughout the ’00s I went to Fat Cat and saw killer bands being listened to attentively by college kids who were there to drink beer and sit on the couches, and got turned on by the music unexpectedly. These days, when someone like Seamus Blake or Lage Lund plays Smalls or 55 Bar on a weekend, you cannot get into the club. Do you suppose it’s old people filing in for the midnight set?
Why do I get the feeling that Terry Teachout is neither going to these clubs nor listening to these artists? That’s what gets me — he seems not particularly well-informed about the cutting edge of jazz, yet he takes to the pages of a major paper to tell the public, in effect, why bother.
What kind of music are we talking about, anyway? By now there are plenty of people in DJ-culture land who know very well that they must pay attention to what Steve Lehman and Vijay Iyer are doing. And another thing — if no young people are listening to jazz, why are so many young people playing it, all over the world? This morning at 7 a.m., when I do some of my best listening (thanks to the baby), I was nearly knocked out of my La-Z-Boy by bassist Linda Oh‘s forthcoming debut album Entry. Oh is Chinese-Malaysian, raised partly in Australia, came to New York only three years ago. Her story is the future of jazz, it seems to me.
I know I risk being accused of cheerleading (see this discussion), but I’ll take cheerleading over doomsaying any day.
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