Life After the Death of Jazz

A few months ago, I was talking to a bassist friend about the current jazz scene. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder if jazz is going to become a purely interpretive art form, like classical music.” He wasn’t kidding.

Every generation of jazz aficionados has included a small but dedicated group of doomsayers who have glumly predicted that the end of the music is nigh. But the jazz community today is pervaded by a general malaise to which no one seems immune. Despite a thriving jazz festival circuit that stretches from Mumbai to Medicine Hat and a recent spate of jazz-oriented albums from pop stars like Rod Stewart and Smokey Robinson, many people feel that the art form has stalled, and that jazz musicians have been treading water since the late 1960s.

Assigning blame for this lack of forward momentum has become a popular pastime in jazz circles. Some point to the dearth of jazz venues where young musicians can experiment with new sounds. Others blame record labels that would rather milk their back catalogues for reissues than gamble on young, unknown iconoclasts. Still others rail against the proliferation of university jazz programs that produce hordes of clones, and the lack of state funding for a music that ceased to be popular shortly after World War II. And there’s always the argument that trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his fellow neoclassicists have sucked the life out of the music. Besotted by the classic jazz produced from the 1920s to the 1960s, musicians like Marsalis—now artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the most famous jazz musician in the world—are routinely accused of devoting more time and energy to reconstructing historical styles than inventing new ones, and of sacrificing innovation on the altar of ancestor-worship.

In Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved to a New Address), the British jazz critic Stuart Nicholson concludes that European jazz musicians, with their plush state subsidies and healthy disregard for tradition, represent the last great hope for the music. By contrast, Gary Giddins, the current dean of American jazz writers, admits to pessimism. “For the first time,” he wrote in a 2004 essay, “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead,” “a large percentage of the renewable jazz audience finds history more compelling than the present, and young musicians, who once aimed above all else for an original voice, are now content to parrot the masters.”


For the first fifty years or so of its history, jazz underwent such regular and significant change that the music itself served as a trope for progress and modernity. By the late 1920s, trumpeter Louis Armstrong had taken the collectively improvised polyphony of early New Orleans jazz and turned it into a soloist’s art. Soon after, swing-era musicians expanded the music’s harmonic palette while introducing ever more sophisticated techniques of arrangement and orchestration. The 1940s saw the birth of bebop, a radically disruptive movement led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie that rendered jazz more dissonant, more virtuosic, and less dancer-friendly than ever before. And the 1950s witnessed simultaneous efforts to extend and retrench the harmonic complexity of the music, resulting in both the furious chordal assault of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and the expansive modal jazz of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

By the early 1960s, however, jazz had entered a phase from which it has yet to recover. Musicians like pianist Cecil Taylor and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, frustrated with the limitations of conventional jazz, began taking radical liberties with such fundamental musical parameters as meter, harmony, and tonality. The resulting music, known as free jazz, inspired considerable controversy. Fans, critics, and musicians all debated whether music that differed so substantially from what had come before—that did not necessarily swing, or allude to the blues, or possess the kind of melodic, formal, and temporal coherence normally associated with jazz—was, in fact, jazz at all (or music, for that matter).

Nonetheless, many of the freedoms introduced by the avant-garde in the 1960s were rapidly assimilated into the mainstream. And therein lies the crux of the problem facing today’s jazz musicians: the last great expansion in the basic vocabulary of the music took place over thirty years ago, when a generation of performers wedded the free-ranging approaches of Coleman, Taylor, and others with more conventional techniques. Since that time, a number of influential stylists have graced the scene, but it has become increasingly difficult for jazz musicians to say anything shockingly new. Jazz may no longer be capable of producing revolutionary movements. After decades of tumult, the recent lack of upheaval feels an awful lot like stagnation.

Classical music faced a similar impasse in the 1950s. Reacting against the rigid academic determinism of modernist composition, composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman defied every convention. Ultimately, their experimentation with “chance procedures—“making music by rolling dice— didn’t just result in new and interesting combinations of sounds; it also ensured that merely being transgressive would never again serve as a guarantee of originality. Once you’ve broken all the rules, continuing to break them is no longer a very big deal.

Contemporary jazz musicians find themselves in a similar quandary. As the pianist Robert Glasper says, “You can’t push harmony any further without it being free jazz—and that’s old.” Of all the challenges currently facing jazz, this is the big one—because it is aesthetic and therefore not easily resolved, and because it calls into question the very notion of what jazz is. What becomes of a musical tradition whose very essence has been pegged to modernity when modernity is no longer easily defined

If jazz is going to remain something other than a sacred relic venerated by a coterie of acolytes, musicians must find a way to breathe fresh life into the music while simultaneously broadening its appeal. Fortunately, some are already recognizing that they are by no means restricted to rummaging around in their own well-trodden backyard for inspiration. There is a wide world of music out there from which to beg, borrow, and steal ideas, and the most adventurous jazz musicians are doing just that. In the process, they are reclaiming the inclusive ethos that once lay at the heart of the music.