"FACING THE MUSIC"

The jazz community taking stock and a hard look at new numbers...

BY LARRY BLUMENFELD, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009 -- INSIDE ARTS

“Can Jazz Be Saved?” critic Terry Teachout asked in his August 9th column in the Wall Street Journal. We knew what that meant. Just the latest pronouncement — there’s a tradition of these dating back several decades — of jazz as dead. Or good as dead. Or very, very sick indeed. “It’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy,” Teachout continued, “or that its future looks anything but bleak.”

His diagnosis was based upon Arts Participation 2008, the fourth such National Endowment for the Arts survey (in partnership with the United States Census Bureau) since 1982. Chiefly, Teachout cited the fact that just 7.8 percent of adult Americans had attended a jazz performance last year, down from 10 percent in 2002. And those who did attend were older than in the past — the median age of listeners for live jazz had risen from 29, in 1982, to 46, in 2008.

“The audience for jazz in America is both shrinking and aging,” Teachout concluded. Historian Ted Gioia had sounded an alert a month earlier at the Jazz.com website. “Certainly the NEA study only confirms the worst possible interpretation of recent events,” he wrote. “Many of us would like to believe that the current collapse in many long-standing jazz institutions is simply a temporary situation, driven by the overall economic malaise. The NEA study suggests that a more chronic problem exists, and that even a reversal in employment figures and home prices won’t be enough to prop up the dwindling jazz audience.” But it was Teachout’s piece, in a widely read newspaper (full disclosure: I write for the Journal, too) that riled folks up. Enter the bloggers, musicians and critics with responses ranging from dismissive to outraged. Critic David Adler asked, “If no young people are listening to jazz, why are so many young people playing it all over the world?”

The entire article can be found here.