First, all your picks are, in the total history of American jazz, fairly recent. No Kid Ory, no George Lewis, no Red Nichols, not even any Benny Goodman. Second, "greatness" without the greatest of them all: Louis Armstrong? Third, no vocals. Do the names Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Billy Eckstein, Mel Torme or Matt Dennis mean nothing to professor Bauerlein. (Hint to jazz reformers: Young people often like singing in their music.) Finally, LOUD. It's generally bad, I'll admit, but music today is LOUD. Rock, country, reggae, salsa--it's all LOUD. Jazz is usually not all that LOUD.

I find it ironic that you are lamenting the current status of jazz in popular culture, yet end with a list of dead musicians (only two of the artists on your list are still alive). If jazz wants to keep it's audience, it needs to be fresh and evolve, not just relive the "glory days." Why not list musicians who are still alive and touring? This might get a reader to actually go out and see a show. A list (off the top of my head) of 10 jazz musicians who are still alive and touring: Peter Brotzmann John Zorn Ken Vandermark Joshua Redman Mary Halvorson Han Bennink Dave Douglas Mattew Shipp Joe Lovano Marc Ribot

This was just a group of ten, gents. Nothing exhaustive intended. Please add more to the canon, but make them specific pieces, not names of musicians and singers. bhirsch--which of Lovano's works would you cite? What, bruno, by Stijn? Which Goodman, gozewu--"Stardust," a version of "Goodbye"?

yes, young people think that jazz = classiscal now. (No, they don't think they are are the same thing, but they put them in the same category of high-culture music.) Radio stations tell them to think that way. The same public radio stations that play classical also play jazz. The popular music stations don't play jazz.

When Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker toured California in the 1940s, audiences booed. The music was too sophisticated for them. You couldn't dance to it, they yelled. Be careful when romanticizing any genre as "popular." To you now, bebop may feel as if it were once popular. But it really wasn't. I notice that you make this same hyperbolic gesture when you discuss literature.

As a lifelong fan of jazz, and one who has seen most of the the greats on this limited list, I am not surprised by the fact that jazz is a niche form of music. It always has been. Jazz is not about mass popularity, but its influence infuses virtually every other music format.

They aren't reading Bildungsromane either. They couldn't care less about abstract expressionism.

Don't know about other public K-12 school districts - but here in Iowa City, Iowa we have a fabulous jazz band/choir program! The highlights each year include an all day regional competition with 50? 75? groups. My son's Jr.High school has both 7th and 8th grade bands, which each meet twice a week, before school, with probably 30 members each. They do fabulous improv work. Then there is a combined HS/JR high "Jazz Showcase" nightclub style show each year, with an outstanding outside clinician brought in for 2 days worth of work. This is paid for by parent donations. The Showcase has 2 shows - both sold out. The band directors love their craft and put in many, many extra hours and the students are fabulous musicians! We are building that next generation of both jazz players and consumers. Others should take note. We took our 16 year old to her first live Jazz show for her 5th birthday. She fell asleep 1/2 way through...but it was a start!

I agree with Mr. Bauerlein and the comments posted by other readers. As a 39 year-old, I have always loved jazz and make every effort to attend live concerts. Last year, I fulfilled a dream of mine by attending the Newport Jazz Festival (a great place to see some of the rising young stars in jazz--such as the incredible Esperanza Spaulding). However, it is becoming increasingly difficuly to attend concerts given the exorbitant price of the tickets ($75 for one day at the Newport Jazz Festival). I hope jazz can appeal to the younger generation, but I am at a loss at how it can do so.

Well, perhaps things aren't as bad as they appear. It seems that all the statistics on declining attendance cited in the article were for attendance at live performances, and they were compared to 1982 numbers. One alternative explanation for the decline in all small-venue live performances is the rise of internet music. If one can now obtain even smaller-market non-mainstream performances such as jazz, classical, etc. at will from an internet vender, one has less need to make the effort to attend performances in jazz clubs, etc. I noticed that the comparison genres did not include large-venue mainstream concert attendance. I don't know, but I might expect that those numbers have decreased as well. Even if not, a large-venue concert (rock, pop, etc.) offers mass social-bonding experiences that arguably are not provided by smaller jazz, classical, or blues concerts, so the comparison would not be apples to apples. A similar argument could be made about the 'aging' of the Jazz market. Older people (like me) don't use internet music stores as much; hence they still feel as though they need to attend a concert in order to enjoy the niche music they prefer, while younger people would skip the concert and download the jazz songs. I'd like to see the statistics on Jazz downloads from internet music stores, and if they are declining.

Most likely, the numbers have decreased because jazz artists aren't touring - at least not to the major metropolitan (southern) area in which I live! Here, the number of jazz artists visiting are low and nil- yet I hear about them visiting the midwest, west and east all the time. Steverhowell's comments are on point - I don't use internet music stores as much and would attend concerts - if only there were more from which to choose! I should also mention that there is only ONE radio station featuring jazz in the city - and it is by virtue of a university! This is contrasted by the fact that when I moved here 30+ years ago, the area was booming with jazz concerts, clubs, and radio stations! Now, I must listen to internet or XM radio to hear jazz outside my home. Not only are jazz enthusiasts getting older - it's getting harder to find jazz to see and to listen to.

This article really IS shortsighted. Not only does it seeminly not take into account the greats that got jazz started, like Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, etc. And of course, those who continue to carry the torch - the Brecker brothers and the Marsalis brothers to name a few. But something else the article (and thus, its writer) does badly is assume that because a person doesn't attend live jazz, one is not a jazz fan. Like the poster above who lamented the $75 admission to Newport, money is often an issue. Smokey venues is another serious issue for both fans and musicians alike. Thus, I must content myself to constantly acquire new music for my home-listening pleasure. This is how I will support the jazz music industry and her musicians, both dead and alive.

Give the guy a break. He said he was specifically talking about 1945-65, and it's an OK list from that period. But I wonder about the basic thesis of the piece -- that the listening audience for jazz is shrinking. What clearly IS shrinking and graying, if the stats are correct, is the audience for live performance. I suspect that many jazz listeners rarely attend live performances -- and it is certainly the case that no one can attend a live performance by any of the artists on the list. But we CAN still listen to them.

I confess I'm an amateur here, but I do think that those who don't see a decline in jazz's popularity don't take into account the enormous cultural presence and meaning of Parker, Monk, and the rest during the 1950s and 60s. When Baraka was thrown in jail, he has said, he hummed to himself every Coltrane solo he knew. Monk was on the cover of Time Magazine. In "What's New, Pussycat?" (if I remember correctly), a drunken Paula Prentiss drags Peter O'Toole back to her apartment to hear her poetry, which begins, "Who killed Charlie Parker? You! You rat." How many albums sold more than "Time Out" the year it was released?

Jazz may be losing out in America but it's getting popular by the day in far off places like Goa, India. Here's where you can hear for yourself: http://www.jazzgoa.com

A few factors worth noticing: a. the steady decline in the number of performance venues that allow for younger audiences (most jazz venues are 21+ now, and the monopoly of booking by companies like ClearChannel means that only a handful of players can pay to play) b. the near total dominance of music sales by rock, soul, r&b, rap, etc. c. jazz was once dance music, but it has long since given up that role to other forms of dance music d. even successful jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis, were at best opening up for rock acts by the 70s (see his Autobiography on his opinion of having to open for The Steve Miller Band) e. Anthony Braxton has discussed in some detail the ways in which, as rock/pop/r&b took over the mainstream venues, jazz music was split into sub-genres -- avant-garde, pop or smooth jazz, traditionalists, fusion -- that each went its separate ways in terms of audience, venue, labels, festivals, etc. f. One thing that kept jazz alive in the late 70s and early 80s was crossovers. The Knitting Factory in NYC -- now, ironically, a mostly indie club -- brought together post-punk, avant garde, and jazz crowds. And it had all ages shows. Freak jazz musicians such as Bill Frissell, John Zorn, and others might have sold more because punk was creating an environment for challenging music. g. the rise of Detroit techno and hip hop in the early 80s signalled the complete end of jazz as a dance music ('tho who besides the musical nostalgics were dancing to jazz in the 70s is beyond me). h. great jazz continues to be recorded and played. Philadelphia has a great series of avant-garde jazz shows, in all ages venues with a very mixed crowd in terms of age, race, class, education, etc. Everyone from West Philly anarchist squatters to UPenn profs to downtown hipsters to Kerouac-reading teenagers. My favorite jazz musician of recent years is Dave Douglass. He's gotten tamer in the 00s, but his work in the 90s was challenging and brilliant, bringing together countless strains of jazz, klezmer, punk, electronica, experimental classical, and folk music.

"...bringing together countless strains of jazz, klezmer, punk, electronica, experimental classical, and folk music" prompts a question: Why is it so especially commendable in music, particularly in Western non-classical music, to be extremely eclectic? Granted that strictly speaking, nothing is born full-form from the head of Zeus (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for instance, combines 1500-year-old Christianity with medieval fresco techniques with ancient Greek ideas about the human body with then-contemporary distortions). But contemporary music seems to find eclectism absurdly praiseworthy. New rock bands are routinely touted for playing "post-punk, Afro-Carribbean, house music," or the like. Are klezmer, punk and electronica in turn just stews of other things, and those other things stews of other things so that what we have in Mr. Douglass's music is--to switch metaphors slightly--a succotash of succotashes? Is there anybody out there who is either (gasp!) original or who practices something in a relatively (OMG!) pure form?

Same Old Story...ding dong "Jazz is Dead"...to my knowledge as American Musical Art forms go...Jazz is one of the oldest and certainly one of the strongest. Since the turn of the century @ 1900...the Jazz/Blues culture has been growing and evolving. The problem is current American Media has a short attention span and feels no obligation to censor the crap it promotes as viable. They feed junk food to our youth 24-7 and wonder why juvenile diabetes is on the rise, they promote violent art forms in movies, cartoons, video games and music and wonder why children solve their conflicts violently. I know I am mixing metaphors, but the reality is the responsibility lies within the industries that benefit from our media choices. People are sheep...( the Bible tells me so..) lead them to Jazz and they will follow!! Offer a thirsty man a glass of clean water vs a glass of muddy spew and let him decide. However, in today's marketplace he has few choices. Exposure and marketing is the problem...sure some Jazz music is "exotic" but the bulk of the music the Young Cats are blowin' currently is very accessible and crosses many "popular" genres. Mainstream tastes will always lag behind the artists vision...luckily I have lived long enough to see technology open up a whole new distribution vehicle that the masses young and old are keyed into...the internet. Those of us that spend time on forums like this one need to fight for Jazz. As I have said many times..."Spread the good news...Jazz is not dead...the pot is on the stove and can't ya smell what the FUNK is Cookin?" Long Live Jazz Music!! - Brian Phoenix

But weren't mainstream tastes and artists' visions in jazz pretty close back in the 1930s, Brian? Isn't there an issue with at least some jazz musicians separating from audiences over the course of the 50s and 60s? I love "Free Jazz," but I don't know anybody who will listen to it with me.

Sorry to clog this thread up with repeated posting (Whee! Just like the old "Brainstorm"!), but I don't quite get Mr. Phoenix's comment. "Same Old Story...ding dong 'Jazz Is Dead'" seems to say that there is no problem, that "Jazz is dead" (or dying)" is--to mix my metaphors--an evergreen red herring, that "Young Cats are blowin'" very accessible music, etc. In the next breath, however, he says that there is a problem, and that "current American Media" is responsible for it, by promoting everything from junk food to violent video games and movies. (I'm assuming that Mr. Phoenix didn't avoid mentioning the promotion of rock and roll simply because he was afraid of incurring the wrath of rock fans.) The solution, he says, actually lies in the fact that "people are sheep" and can be easily led back to jazz. (I'm not sure, though, that "Be a sheep, listen to jazz" is a great slogan for promoting jazz.) What Mr. Teachout's article and Prof. Bauerlein's post said was not that nobody's playing jazz or that nobody's listening to it; they said that statistics suggest that the jazz audience is getting older and less numerous, i.e., dying off, and that jazz is sliding toward the fringe of the national musical taste in the country that invented it. As "winstonbarclay" pointed out, the stats are mitigated by their concerning only attendance at live performances. Attendance at live performances of anything is down, isn't it? The recession bids people stay home and save money, and the technology allows people to experience something close to live performance (save for clink of glasses and the chatter of other attendees) on their home sound systems, or even the ones in their cars. A more meaningful stat would be the percentage of jazz tracks downloaded on iTunes. Is it going up or down?

Interesting article and a question I often ponder. I wonder if the various comments about high ticket prices and unobserved home listening tell much of the story. Not to mention casual listeners who will never show up in the statistics we can cite. I have many friends who will listen to jazz whenever I play it for them, but who would never buy the music on their own. The bigger question here is how we measure ourselves against the past. So often we assume a decline of culture but we lack an accurate way to make comparisons. Mr. Bauerlein makes good observations, but they also can be minimized with a little context. Yes, Thelonious Monk was on the cover of Time. But what does the article say? The article opens with a description of Monk walking out to a crowd of 2,500 people--in Finland. Later the article explains, "Such European enthusiasm for a breed of cat many Americans still consider weird if not downright wicked, may seem something of a puzzle. But to many jazzmen touring Europe, it is one more proof that the limits of the art at home are more sociological than esthetic." Whatever the explanation for the limits of his popularity in America, the article appears mostly as a popular introduction of Monk to a generally unknowing public. And how many albums sold more than "Time Out" in 1959, the year of its release? Presumably more than a few, since "Time Out" never made it to #1 on the charts. Lastly, Baraka may have sung every Coltrane solo in jail, but he's not representative of the average American at the time. If we are talking about measuring mainstream popularity, even Baraka would agree he would not be the litmus test. So while we can confirm that those who love jazz found and continue to find it deeply meaningful, measuring widespread, casual, and popular interest seems more elusive.

goxewu: Bridging musical traditions is not, of course, in itself good or bad. As with anything in the arts, it's all about the quality of the musicians and their vision. My point in bringing up Dave Douglass's eclecticism was that he's been one of the few relatively successful and famous new jazz musicians of any real quality of the past two decades, moving up from tiny experimental jazz labels to major labels quite quickly. And I'd argue that part of his success is owing to his ability to put jazz in dialogue with a lot of other musical traditions, in bringing together listening communities that are too often separated. Bill Frisell would be another excellent example of this phenomenon. He can sell records and fill halls with integrity precisely because he finds a fanbase across the borders: jazz, rock, folk, Americana, ambient, noise, drone, etc. As with anything, young people need to be exposed to jazz. Quality jazz. Sure, they might hear some swing or light bop on public radio, but mostly these stations play old chestnuts. It's the effect of listening to once challenging music, like The Beatles, a million times a day while working the counter at the department store. I'll always remember the first time I *really* heard jazz. I had been reading something by Kerouac in high school, and I went to a music shop, where the owner recommended a CD of Thelonius Monk's WWII era bop and Coltrane's *A Love Supreme*. What I heard was so much more than the Gap-commercial swing I thought constituted jazz at the time. And it's not like kids wouldn't be into it. So many of the indie rock bands today that my high school students like -- Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, Deerhunter -- are influenced by out jazz.

Good points about the Monk article, jclay. But "Time Out" did reach #2 on the Billboard "pop" chart. It was popular enough for Steely Dan to ask "Are you made about Brubeck?" in their "New Frontier" lyrics.

My brother is a jazz musician, I'm in theater - both struggling art forms. We talk about the waning audiences quite a bit, and I talk about the ways that contemporary (and academic) theater has really made going to plays punitive. It used to be fun and participatory, now it's a chore. He says himself (with pride, mind you) that jazz has always been, to some extent, an exclusionary form of art. The slang alone marks some people as being in the know and some as being outside of it. You can learn to love it, but most jazzers aren't going to help you - you gotta keep up. I've also taught a college arts course where we spend a lot of time on jazz and go see some shows. The students almost universally complain about how annoying it is to have to applaud after every solo, even if it wasn't particularly inspiring. In my experience, they actually like the music - they just hate the culture around it.

Re Mr. Blissett's comment and "Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, Deerhunter": One of the nice things about jazz is the relative lack of Ooooooh-how-enigmatic!/Oooooh-how-outlier! names rock bands give themselves. There was a comic strip several years ago called, I think, "Underworld," in which a frequent appearance was made by a guy lying in bed thinking up rock band names: four identical panels except for the difference in the lists in the four thought balloons. The lists resembled the products of that Postmodern Word Generator. And concerning Prof. Bauerlein's wistful yearning for "greatness" in music, those real rock bands have the lives of fruit flies. Hard to be great with a two-year career.

goxewu, you clearly have your finger on the pulse of the burning issues in popular music. A band name is a brand name. Its only purpose is to be memorable and to stand out. Often, the names have a special significance to the band and its scene, as with "Jefferson Airplane," which is the name of a type of improvised roach clip. Jazz bands were saved from the need for such arrangements precisely because they were subordinated to the identity of their leader (Duke Ellington Orchestra, Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, etc.) or to their neighborhood (New Orleans marching bands, for example). As jazz units moved beyond this, they turned to the same sorts of ridiculous names as rock bands: Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Zony Mash, Machine Gun, etc. And it's not like a bunch of musicians with borrowed royal titles is all that more tasteful (if playfully ironic); and it's not like all the Blind Otis Stanfords and Gimpy Leroy Phillips and One-Legged Sal Amaccios don't make blues musicians easily caricatured. FInally, every short lived rock band has a no-name jazz musician or band counterpart. The Beatles needed less than a decade to achieve greatness. The Stones continue, for better or worse. David Bowie and John Cale have had a 40 year career, Scott Walker and Lou Reed 45 years, Bob Dylan 50 years. The Holy Modal Rounders still tour with original material. Even those scary punk bands, like X or Wire or ESG or The Mekons, keep on keepin' on. Frank Zappa would still be ahead of the game if cancer hadn't taken him away. Let's not get into a holier-than-thou jazz vs. rock contest. (And such holier-than-thou-ism might be another reason why jazz in its Lincoln-Center-Canonical mode has turned off so many people.)

Luther mentions at the end the "Canonical mode" as if it were a pejorative, but let's be clear that jazz players going way back were intensely canon-minded, deeply conscious of tradition.

Mark, Albert Murray makes that point quite well in *Stomping the Blues*. However, while I think Murray's one of our greatest living writers, I also think he and Marsalis have contributed to a zombification of jazz tradition conceived so narrowly and upheld so self-righteously as to turn off many. Which is why I wrote "Lincoln-Center-Canonical" as opposed to, say, alternative canons that would include amazing players Wynton has gone out of his way to attack (such as Braxton).

Gee, my little aside about rock band names (which is undeniably true--just open the ads-for-clubs pages of any "alternative weekly") touched a nerve. It wasn't "holier than thou." My musical tastes are a lot less sophisticated than Mr. Blissett's and tend toward more toward old-fashioned, three-chord rock and roll than toward free jazz in Paris circa 1962, and the only kind of recorded music I can stand to listen to for more than an hour is Chicago blues. But how techty these jazz fans get when an observation is irritatingly accurate. It's just that I know where a discussion is going when somebody brings up the pseudo-weirdly named bands that high school kids listen to as a kind of credential. When I still was a college professor, I used to familiarize myself, lightly, with four or five current bands before the start of a semester. Drop one or two of their names into an early class discussion, and I had the students in the palm of my hand. I recognize variations on the technique when I see it.

I think, Luther, that the best traditions tend to be "conceived narrowly," but you're right about "zombification." Was any documentary filled with more fatuous narrative overlay than was Ken Burns's "Jazz"?