A&E
Lest you think Jazz is dead, Robert Glasper Trio to perform this weekend
By Alex Witonsky ’17
February 18, 2016
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Renowned jazz-pianist and two-time Grammy winner Robert Glasper is set to play with his trio at Wellin on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Before I discuss Glasper and what is sure to be a stellar performance, I’ll attempt to clear the air of a nasty rumor surrounding jazz music.
There are three horsemen sounding the death knells of the great American genre: an aging listenership, the scattered retreat of jazz into the streams, tides and esoteric eddies of internet listening and music providers and the anti-label/individual-artist aesthetics of remaining major jazz labels. Sound familiar?
Nielsen, the stalwart data and information provider for the music industry, concluded in its 2014 Year End Report that jazz, like a musical polar-negative to America’s elite, comprised only 1.2 percent of the total music consumption in America—putting it on par exactly with the consumption of Christian/gospel music. Only children’s music sold worse than jazz at 1 percent of total music consumption. If jazz represents the sad bubbles in the bottle of American music, then pop, R&B/hip-hop and rock are the frothing top with a respective 14.9 percent, 17.2 percent and a heady 29 percent of total consumption.
What if Nielsen’s morbid prognosis, the deathwatch beetle sounding imminent death to jazz, was actually a healthy indication of the genre’s status not only as type of music, but as a practice through history?
Recently, delusional opportunists have misconstrued Nielsen’s data and have discovered the “imminent death of jazz.” It seems intuitive: paltry consumption signifies dwindling popularity. The bait was all too enticing for media-outlets and the casual observer alike. The result is a cliché: jazz is moribund. To justify the validity of this great musical passing, media-outlets propose and publish reasons (like the fabricated ones opening the second paragraph). It’s wildly irresponsible and has little bearing on reality.
Nielsen exposes the hardened arteries of a diseased body peddling music as commodity—the Music Industry. Genres, genres, genres. The data-analysis company fails to diagnose trends that lie outside the immediate ken of music as big business and big business as music.
See, when we say we’re “listening to rock” or “rap” we take part in a kind of dissonant dialogue that both defies and conforms to a label-crazed industry. That there are genres within genres and vastly different preferences across age-gaps as small as five years is an unquestionable and obvious truth of music in the internet age; citing rock as your preferred type of music is to use a mega-umbrella term–it’s equivalent to answering “salty” when someone asks you your favorite food. When someone answers thus, we have learned little about their preferences. What’s the use of sorting information this way, of Nielsen’s in the first place?
Because Nielsen provides an accurate cosmology of industry-defined genres and music at the same time it perpetuates genre-defined industry. Take Glasper, an artist under the famed Blue Note label who draws extensively on hip-hop, grunge and pop. Nielsen agglomerates Glasper as simply a jazz musician. Again, labelling him as such is not necessarily untrue, but it fails to accurately track jazz as a musical style with a set of conventions that are continuously bent and broken, revered and rejected, eternal and newborn and otherwise refashioned and recirculated.
As it turns out, jazz is less of a musical term and more of a historical one. Jazz has been used to describe New Orleans dixieland from the aughts, the solo-acts and ragtime being played in Harlem and Chicago jazz clubs of the 20s, the big-band and swing styles of the 30s and 40s and the (acquired taste) free-form jazz developed in the 50s and 60s. Of course, jazz was nascent in the blues, a form that reaches back past the turn of the century. And the blues reached back to slave songs. Where do they begin, end and fuse? The historical characteristics of jazz-movements and jazz as music made of formal properties (doubtful) are hardly sortable.
Jazz reincarnates across the genrelines; better, it transcends them. The top-dogs of the American music industry as construed by Nielsen: rock, R&B/hip hop and pop all contain artists that draw on the musical and performative elements of jazz. Major and minor historical instances of intersection alike should be immediately obvious. To entertain that these genres haven’t intersected (as Nielsen seems to suggest) and more, that one faces death, is preposterous. Jazz continues to thrive anytime people listen to contemporary music, period.
Thankfully, I think this method of evaluating music has already lost traction for the vast majority of people interested in listening and creating music. To wit, major players in the hip-hop world adeptly recombine the sounds of jazz music past; to make jazz one must also be a historian of music.
Robert Glasper’s 2015 album Covered is an essay on jazz as a site for the imbrication of history and music. The Trio recorded the album in a live studio-session in Capitol Record’s legendary Studio A in Hollywood, California. Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! was recorded there (a major inspiration according to Glasper) and Nat King Cole’s New York Steinway “B” piano was played there. This model is produced in the record itself: Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Harry Belafonte and John Legend are all covered.
Included in Glasper’s trio are bassist Vincent Archer and drummer Daimon Reid. Covered reunites a group that released BlueNote’s Canvas (2005) and In My Element (2007). Expect songs from Covered and more Saturday night. Aside from that, we’re in for a good night of…jazz? Enjoy.