Welcome to the New Jazz Age
Everyone knows vinyl has made a vigorous comeback, enjoying double-digit advances in sales nearly every year of the last decade. But more recently, a barely acknowledged, and even less likely, revival has taken place: for jazz.
Long viewed as “difficult” to listen to and poisonous to market, jazz has stealthily inched its way back up the charts, aided in key part by both star power and some clever acts of genre-blending.
The spike began back in September 2014, when Tony Bennett hitched his brand to Lady Gaga’s for their joint album Cheek to Cheek. Their tandem collection of snazzy standards opened in the premiere spot on the Billboard 200, and went on to sell more than 1million copies. Six months later, Kendrick Lamar issued To Pimp a Butterfly, an unprecedented blend of avant-jazz, rap, and funk which echoed Bennett and Gaga’s “cheeky” #1 debut. It went on to become, perhaps, the most critically acclaimed album of its year.
Fast-forward 10 months to David Bowie’s final work, Blackstar. Partially inspired by Lamar’s Pimp, the album forged a new fusion of jazz and rock with key help from the band led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin. In January, Blackstar likewise debuted at #1.
According to the most recent industry market report from Nielsen/SoundScan, jazz-tinged albums accounted for three of top-selling vinyl albums in the first half of this year. They include Blackstar at #1, Pimp at #6, and Miles Davis’s classic Kind of Blue (the top-selling jazz work of all time) at #9. Beyond the vinyl niche, Blackstar ranks as the eighth-biggest-selling album of 2016.
Next week, jazz has yet another shot at a lofty chart perch. Norah Jones’s new album, Day Breaks, her first stone-cold jazz effort, will hit the charts with a presumed bang. Four of Jones’s five previous albums have entered in the top five, three of them starting at #1. Laced with contributions by saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Lonnie Smith, Day Breaks rates as Jones’s most compelling album since her blockbuster debut.
The jazz parade will likely continue later in October, when Michael Bublé issues his first album in three years. It stresses jazz standards in the Tony Bennett mold. Bublé’s last four albums have each scaled the chart’s peak.
“I see a real opportunity for jazz right now,” Donny McCaslin told me last week. “These successes show that jazz still has the opportunity to reach a large audience.”
I know what you’re thinking. Many of the artists mentioned here aren’t “real jazz” stars. I call to the stand Bowie and Lamar. In fact, the grand majority of stars considered strictly jazz players still sell poorly, making the genre, overall, the second-lowest-selling sound around, tied with classical music and just a notch above children’s music. More, some of the releases mentioned here arrived under special circumstances, most dramatically Bowie’s. He died two days after Blackstar came out, greatly incentivizing sales.
Point taken on that last issue. But the first one begs a question which actually gets to the heart of the genre’s continued creative strength: What, exactly, constitutes jazz?
It’s hard to say, actually. “Jazz” has changed its sound, and style, so many times since its start in the late 1800s, any firm definition would be folly. It’s so diffuse, Wikipedia lists over 50 subgenres amid its curious, and adaptive, history. For many decades, those wily advancements made jazz highly commercial. Ragtime, in the late 19th century, had the hit-appeal of pop. So did the various iterations of swing from the ‘20s through the ‘40s. Jazz didn’t start losing its connection to pop until the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-to-late ‘50s. By the British invasion of the mid-‘60s, the genre found itself almost entirely ghettoized, cordoned off either to the snotty realm of the avant-garde or the greying dustbin of nostalgia. Pop fans became either bored or intimidated by jazz, robbing it of any claim on youth.
The late-‘60s/early-‘70s witnessed a valiant attempt to inject new blood, via the fusion boom. Miles Davis kicked the movement off with creatively brilliant, and cannily marketed, albums like 1969’s opus Bitches Brew. Its success inspired the formation of formidable bands led by Miles collaborators, from John McLaughlin, with Mahavishnu Orchestra, to Chick Corea, via Return to Forever.
By the late ‘70s, however, fusion found itself slaughtered in the same carnage that took prog-rock, both obliterated by the pith and catchiness of punk and new wave. Joni Mitchell articulated the consequences of any association with the genre at that time: “Jazz killed my career stone dead,” she told The Guardian of her commercially ruinous 1979 album, Mingus. It was eclectic and difficult and radio didn’t want to know.”
It wasn’t until the ‘90s that musicians found a (temporary) mouth-to-mouth solution. It came in the form of hip-hop jazz, forged by highly creative acts like A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr, and Digable Planets. They breathed new life into the rhythms and chord changes of jazz, filtering them through the cut-and-paste beats of hip-hop and the verbal derring-do of rap.
While that eventually receded, as all trends must, it has found a new voice with Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-rap update on Pimp. Ghostface Killah provided a parallel with an adventurous release last year, Sour Soul, which mixed rap with live tracks from the Canadian jazz band BADBADNOTGOOD. In a parallel way, Bowie’s Blackstar provided a 21st century answer to ‘70s fusion, just as Norah Jones’s new collaboration with Wayne Shorter has recast Shorter’s old mind-meld with Joni Mitchell for a fresh generation. Earlier this year, Esperanza Spalding offered her own take on Joni’s jazz with Emily’s D+Evolution. (It was produced by the same man who oversaw Blackstar, longtime Bowie conspirator Tony Visconti).
Jazz hasn’t only upped its recent profile in the world of music. It has also done so in the realm of film. In 2014, the acclaimed movie Whiplash captured the fierce beats of jazz drumming while, this past March, Miles Davis’s got a fresh PR boost thanks to Don Cheadle’s flick Miles Ahead. Simultaneously, the legacy of the late Nina Simone gained far wider exposure than before through the Oscar-nominated film, and Netflix hit, What Happened, Miss Simone?
Keyboardist Robert Glasper has played a key part in this revival and expansion. He both oversaw the Miles Ahead soundtrack and made key contributions to Lamar’s Pimp. In the last month, Glasper released a new album of his own, ArtScience, which, like much of his work, idealizes jazz’s latest iteration. It cocks an ear toward hip-hop, funk, and fusion while maintaining an allegiance to classic jazz principals. As Glasper told me last year, “jazz, in general, has a problem with not being seen as relevant. But how can you complain when you aren’t doing anything to make yourself relevant?”
Thankfully, more and more artists are doing so — and prospering handsomely in the process.
