If you’re here, what I’d like to do first is thank you profusely from the bottom of my heart. Somehow, you’ve managed to find me in a sea of musicians, artists, educators, arrangers, composers, and, frankly, operators. I don’t know if you found the person you think I am, or if I’ve represented myself to you accurately, but thank you for being aware of me. I’ll try to make the most of the time you’ve given me.
While I have your eyeballs, I’d like to talk to you about how this whole jazz thing works in 2023.
Over the summer, I posted a series of videos on Instagram (you can find them @tonesforbonesjones, where I regularly blur the line between professional and personal content! I think I found a way to keep those audiences separate, however successfully.) The videos were a reflection of how I got here, to my current station within the “jazz” infrastructure.
(I use quotes around that word, of course, because it isn’t my word, it isn’t my favorite word, and it’s not what I consider myself to be doing. To me, it’s more of an umbrella for quite a few different cohorts, groups, mindsets, contributions, and cultures. To the extent that I am still under that umbrella, I will use it to identify the tradition from which all of this has resulted, but that doesn’t mean the results fit everyone’s idea of “jazz.” Far from it.)
If you’re here, you’re probably musically inclined, and likely a musician yourself, which means you have some sense of what I mean, but let’s assume that the baseline reader isn’t inside of the infrastructure, to the extent that a musician who has lived in New York would be:
Back in 2010, the community was still largely centralized around the people who had thrived during the recording boom of the early to mid 90’s. Through that centralization, venues emerged that communicated, among many other things, the status of midtown Manhattan. Most of the people I know remember that Dizzy’s Club used to be Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, i.e. this jazz thing was significant enough to Coke that they wanted their name on a venue. Wild, right? Do you think the outside world would have a sense of Coke spending money on naming rights for a jazz club? Most years they’re busy crafting Super Bowl ads. Why the hell would they spend money on a jazz club? (Short answer: there are commercial reasons to get involved in marketing, and then there are other reasons. A company attaches itself to cultural institutions in order to seem humane. You know this. Goldman Sachs is prominently featured outside the elevator when you go to stand on line for Dizzy’s. Go figure.)
The generation that came up immediately after Bird’s passing still had quite a few bandleaders: Sonny Rollins, Roy Haynes, Curtis Fuller, Lou Donaldson, to name a few. But the 90’s cats were unquestionably in charge. They had the biggest role in education, which meant they had the most funding, which meant they had the most money, which meant they lived comfortably. They had full-time jobs, their names were associated with physical music that they could sell rather easily at gigs, and they controlled the cultural and philanthropic infrastructure around black music from top to bottom. If you were an up and coming musician, your choices were to ingratiate yourself with a bandleader, present yourself as an obvious prodigy with the potential to be marketed, or join the herd of musicians for whom there were not even close to enough $50 gigs, or anything resembling artistic or material fulfillment. If you went through the right pipeline at the right time, you could take absolutely advantage of their resources when it was your turn. If not…..welcome to the life.
That was how things worked in 2010. I mentioned that, right?
Now, things are a bit different. Every generation of musicians has seen their share of change within the infrastructure and its ability to provide opportunity.
This change more closely resembles a microcosm of the financial crisis of 2008-09. If you know about this, you know that the catalyst for the collapse was Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, which forbade investment banks from trading with commercial banks’ money. (The Big Short forgot to mention it, but that’s the truth. Merrill Lynch had the right to trade with the $50 you had in Bank of America. Fractional reserve banking, it’s a whole thing and definitely not my department.) Investment banks built these financial instruments around betting that people would pay their mortgages, people did not pay their mortgages, trillions vanished into thin air.
You see it, right? You know where I’m going with this? You see that there was a certain amount of arrogance in the 90’s, which led to a massive upheaval in the late 2000’s once the infrastructure that only worked for those at the top stopped working for anyone? With too much consolidation of an infrastructure, one can knock down the whole tower by removing one block, like a game of Jenga. If that sounds scary, you are indeed following along.
I wish I had better news, or I could say that such a pattern would take quite a bit longer to play out in the music, but something similar happened. As the central figures from the 90’s faded into the background, the social and musical capital they had built faded with them. They can still leave their houses for a paycheck whenever they feel like it, but the leadership they had built around their names didn’t work unless they were public and active, and they just haven’t been since 2015 or so. That would be rough enough, although things didn’t immediately start to deteriorate because of that. No, that started because of this thing you may have heard about called “the pandemic,” when musicians left, clubs closed, and neither made any illusions about returning. Hell, we might’ve been fine if the infrastructure weren’t only as deep or wide as the top. If the foundation served more people, a shock event wouldn’t have changed much for the people who feel this music with every fiber of their being. When enough people feel disregarded, disenchanted, unseen, unheard, unfelt, disrespected, disenfranchised, and unwanted, though, it’s a lot easier for them to just pack up and say, “you know, I don’t need this here, with these people. I think I might just go live my life some other way, where at least I feel appreciated - or I’ll get compensated to feel like this, but this just ain’t it.” Can’t tell you how many great musicians I know have receded into obscurity feeling exactly this way. I didn’t, I swore I never would, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never felt that way. It’s not hard - in fact, it’s easy.
There’s a certain cohort I’ve identified. In larger society, the early millennials, i.e. those born between 1980 and 1994, were the most affected by the 2008 crash, because they hadn’t had the chance to build capital during the better economic years of the 90’s and mid 2000’s, nor had they been drained and numbed by having a microwave computer in their pants for most of their lives. The world hasn’t come up with a name for this block, but it’s out there. You feel it. They’re the end of the 20th century, here to bridge the gap between the old world and the new, but without the equity or influence to help communicate, mediate, translate, or lead. They’ve known that they don’t fit either world particularly well since they came of age, and as such they keep almost exclusively to themselves.
Quick story: not long ago I developed a brotherhood with an individual who was 10 years older than me; his sense of the mainstream zeitgeist almost entirely overlapped with mine. Both of us had retreated to the edges of this world for different reasons, but…that’s definitely not how that usually goes. People with a decade between them are supposed to have noted drastic changes, in line with the massive shifts in the world that were synonymous with the 20th century. That’s all over now. This era is defined by a lack of conclusion or definition. Everything is everything, but never how you imagine it.
Anyway…….
as you might’ve guessed, there is also a class of the music that is disaffected, unaffected, underserved, underutilized, completely unwavering - and maybe a tad unhinged as a result. If someone made them an offer to play music for more than $200, they’d be just as skeptical as if that offer came from Goldman Sachs. They have resigned themselves to make art for their souls whether anyone hears it or not. This is not how it was 15 years ago, but it is now. The early 2000’s cats had the option to toe the line between what labels, venues, booking agents and middlemen wanted, and what they felt most deeply. We do not. To those individuals with whom I share this code, I give you the strongest possible salute. You are artists by default, and I love you for it.
Decisions were made. Reputations were built on those decisions. People did not accidentally end up where they are today. Sure, there have been forces beyond our control, but when haven’t there been? We have all navigated these waters with intent; without an engine, you would still have sails and a steering wheel. Wherever you are, you’ve not been completely misled, misdirected, or lost. Part of this was your doing, however that manifested. You are at least somewhat responsible for where you’ve landed, for better or for worse, because of your intent. The contract you’ve made with the people along your path has determined what you will and won’t tolerate, which has led you to the station you currently occupy. No one is excepted from this.
Real quick: I was under the impression that my feverish dedication to music would overcome not just my technical and instinctive shortcomings, but my inability to play the game as well. I was wrong. Four years of physiological and energetic purgatory set me back, the pandemic stunted everything for everyone, and it’s taken me a few years to plant new seeds. The old seeds weren’t growing into anything I could harvest after not having been watered consistently for seven years. It took me about a year just to get my bearings before the pandemic; by the time everything started opening up again, I just didn’t want to go through that again. That’s what happened to me. It’s neither plain nor simple, but that’s what I got for you. If that’s not enough, I’ll sit down with you and go through it all. (If you stopped caring halfway through, I have no sympathy for your apathy; it just isn’t consequential to me in the slightest.)
So….now, as larger society has replaced actual human interaction with the online public square that takes place primarily on Instagram, so, too, has our community
Let me restate that: the music, which is derived the combination of cultures that took place as a result of slavery, after a global pandemic in which each and every one of us experienced the loneliness of not being able to see each other and had to result to livestreams and Zoom calls for human synergy, has been reintegrated as a marketable commodity within Instagram and YouTube, instead of cultivating real performance spaces and community in real life. That is where we find ourselves in 2023.
More to be said after I’ve built some things.