Terry Tea­chout has decided to tell us that a recent NEA sur­vey tells us that jazz is dying, and that jazz musi­cians must do some­thing about it, namely mar­ket it bet­ter. Really? Gosh, thanks Terry. Now, you’ll per­mit me to call bullshit.

It all started with his arti­cle “Can Jazz Be Saved?” in The Wall Street Jour­nal, his employer. Tea­chout tells the reader that the NEA results demon­strate that the jazz audi­ence in Amer­ica is both shrink­ing in size and also grow­ing older, and that jazz must bring in younger audi­ences to lit­er­ally sur­vive. In a WNYC inter­view, Tea­chout is adamant that the NEW results are hard num­bers, non-anecdotal sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence that proves this. Well, no they aren’t. Just because some­thing is a num­ber doesn’t mean it’s real.

On WNYC, Vijay Iyer dis­putes this, point­ing out that the sur­vey shows an audi­ence decline in all areas, and doesn’t parse out the jazz audi­ence as being some­how excep­tional. Also, the entire coun­try is aging, so sta­tis­ti­cally the audi­ence for any­thing would be aging as well. He is cor­rect, Teachout’s inter­pre­ta­tion is just that, it is a con­clu­sion that is not directly sup­ported by these num­bers. The sur­vey also marks not a trend but a dif­fer­ence to pre­vi­ous trends, i.e. some­thing has changed but there is insuf­fi­cient data through time to draw a par­tic­u­lar con­clu­sion. But another prob­lem, more fun­da­men­tal, is that the ques­tion­naire (which you can see here), men­tions the word “jazz” but doesn’t actu­ally point out what it is. Since not many crit­ics could iden­tify jazz, we can­not assume that a ran­domly selected ques­tion­naire recip­i­ent would be able to iden­tify it either. This is not an idle point. If you went to see Cecil Tay­lor, or Joelle Lean­dre, or Alas­NoAxis, or Allen Tou­s­saint, or Fran­cisco Agua­bella, or John Scofield, did you see a jazz con­cert? Did you go to a club, or restau­rant, eat and drink and lis­ten to some­one play? What the thing that is being mea­sured actu­ally is matters.

The fact is that since Benny Good­man started sep­a­rat­ing swing from dance music, and turn­ing jazz into a con­cert and club music where audi­ences sat and lis­tened instead of tak­ing a turn on the floor, jazz began an eco­nom­i­cally dif­fi­cult and aes­thet­i­cally fruit­ful bal­anc­ing of art and pop­u­lar music. Jazz is many things, but for the past 70 years it has fun­da­men­tally been a music that seeks some pop­u­lar audi­ence through an essen­tially indi­vid­ual, intro­verted path. Jazz can be insanely groov­ing and excit­ing, and it still requires an artist to reach into them­selves and explore, in an absolute and abstract sense, and offer that explo­ration to the audi­ence. That it suc­ceeds at all and grabs lis­ten­ers is amaz­ing to me.

I would argue that it is inevitable that jazz would become essen­tially a cult music. Music that not only includes idiomatic impro­vi­sa­tion but is based on it offers a con­tin­u­ous chal­lenge to audi­ences, which means that its audi­ence will always be lim­ited. Add to that the non-existent musi­cal lit­er­acy in Amer­ica and a com­mer­cial cul­ture that is based on sell­ing as much of some­thing as fast as pos­si­ble, and one should only expect jazz audi­ences to be small. Tea­chout is essen­tially wrong when he writes that “as late as the early ‘50s, jazz was still for the most part a gen­uinely pop­u­lar music … to which ordi­nary peo­ple could dance.” It was no longer a gen­uinely pop­u­lar music, and those peo­ple who did dance to it were … the older audi­ences, that wished back to the days of jazz being defined by dance bands like Fletcher Henderson’s. So, the jazz audi­ence has been aging, and jazz has been dying, for decades. And yet it lives.

The bottom-line in his argu­ment is that jazz has become a high art and has thus dis­tanced itself from audi­ences. Where have I heard that one before? To call this lazy think­ing would be to too gen­er­ously praise the effort that went into it. Jazz has gone through many changes through the decades but is not a palimpsest; it has accu­mu­lated ideas and pos­si­bil­i­ties, all of which are avail­able to musi­cians. A Cecil Tay­lor per­for­mance is indeed a chal­leng­ing con­cert of music, an Ornette Cole­man one is deeply bluesy, one from Jason Moran is full or rock­ing and rol­lick­ing good times while a Bill Char­lap date is for quiet, inti­mate thoughts and cock­tails. Jazz is not one thing, nor are its audi­ences mono­lithic. Tea­chout sees only one audi­ence, how­ever, and that to me reveals a real flaw in val­ues. He writes that “it is pre­cisely because jazz is now widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its mak­ers must start to grap­ple with the same prob­lems of pre­sen­ta­tion” as other high cul­ture insti­tu­tions like muse­ums and opera houses. Here the anec­do­tal wins out over the false-claim to sta­tis­ti­cal cer­tainty; just because Jazz At Lin­coln Cen­ter has insti­tu­tional, includ­ing NEA, sup­port (and Tea­chout him­self has been the ben­e­fi­ciary of NEA sup­port), and just because those con­certs are the stiff, overly-reverent jazz-as-museum-object result of the bale­ful influ­ence of Wyn­ton Marsalis (him­self anointed by insti­tu­tions like the NEA and NPR as America’s Jazz Musi­cian), does not mean that all jazz is like this; pre­served, pre­cious, trans­for­ma­tions through accrual of patina of the won­der­fully vul­gar music of the past into High-Art-Which-Must-Be-Admired. I would expect this critic to see only that, and noth­ing else; the cul­ture pages of The Wall Street Jour­nal exist to offer pos­si­bil­i­ties for edi­fy­ing diver­sion for the oli­garchy of Amer­ica, as the intel­lec­tual core val­ues of the paper hold that mate­r­ial priv­i­lege and power must be held in the hands of a very, very few and any appli­ca­tion of com­mu­nity thought, gen­eros­ity, mutu­al­ity, etc. (Chris­t­ian val­ues, in other words), must be fought in every pos­si­ble way. The Jour­nal is a defender of peo­ple like Angelo Mozilo and Ken Lewis, who have done severe, mate­r­ial harm not only to peo­ple but to our nation’s secu­rity, and also of peo­ple like Rush Lim­baugh and Bill O’Reilly and Dick Cheney, who lit­er­ally advo­cate vio­lent harm of other human beings sim­ply because there is oppo­si­tion to their benighted val­ues. If this is the ulti­mate line and logic of the insti­tu­tions, then jazz should shun them, and do it itself — jazz is the orig­i­nal punk, DIY music.

So how could Tea­chout under­stand that there is, for exam­ple, an entire gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple who are mak­ing them­selves musi­cally lit­er­ate, in a pain-staking way, and are find­ing their way through tech­nol­ogy and music with rel­a­tive mass-appeal, like Spring Heel Jack and DJ Spooky, towards things that are hap­pen­ing now in jazz? Because if jazz is High Art, Chal­leng­ing Con­cert Music, then what are all those drum-and-bass beats doing on that new Steve Lehman CD. How did they get there? And why, when I go see Jordi Savall play, do his kids break out into a lit­tle con­tem­po­rary jazz play­ing? A flawed report does not define a trend, and one man’s lim­ited view of the world is not wisdom.