Posted 8:58 PM by Gene

In the March Atlantic which I cited yesterday there's also an article on Wynton Marsalis's busted career and what it portends for jazz. Hard to believe that jazz once occupied the pop-culture mainstream; born in the distant past of slave quarters and raised in dives, jazz should have figured to be little more than a wail and a beat, but Satchmo brought it opera, and in its symbiosis with the musical stage it produced imperishable music. Jazzmen were stars of radio and film, and their sound was everywhere; it boosted morale incalculably in our worldwide victory over Fascism. Then the vets and their wives made households and babies, which took up free time, then the big bands folded and that ended dancing to the music, then TV and room air conditioning came along, which eliminated a big reason people socialized, then the great Duke started writing "tone poems," then Miles came along and turned his back to the audience, then the PROFESSORS found it, and one of them, who must surely burn in Hell, coined the lethal phrase "America's Classical Music," which made people think jazz was classical music, something for the classroom and the dead, something you listened to as an obligation and against your will. Ask people what jazz is and their first mental image is a bunch of scraggly guys in porkpie hats and goatees scrunched in a broom closet, surrounded by dope addicts, trying to out-Ornette Coleman. The music is so steeped in cliches and has grown so apart from any audience it can't overcome it. Too many folks believe the falsehood that if some high powered genius came along and magically revived the music jazz would come back, and for too long that hope rested on Wynton's narrow shoulders and his very fine but self-limiting talent. But a confluence of forces -- Emancipation, European immigration, an age of invention, the big post-Civil War economic boom -- created so much of our mighty commercial culture, and though it was long-lasting, when the total force was spent, so was the culture. We see it everywhere: in theater that's little more than idle experimentation or public embalming; in movies made for teens, with a mentality for infants; in television that's little more than an improvisation on real life; in a popular music rapidly imploding from its lack of inspiration and appeal. If the rest of our culture is so mortally ill, how can jazz ever be in the bloom of health?