Samhain Winter Moon
Last night Jerry, who has a big band show on KBEM, gave us some statistics. “2% say jazz is their favorite music. Another 2% say classical. .5% like both.” That puts Kate and me into the .5% bracket.
(Coltrane)
Jazz and classical music are an acquired taste. Rock and roll and the other forms of popular music are, too, I suppose, but their acquisition comes laced into high school, i-tunes, radio. Support of their sound comes through commercial channels that, though increasingly fractured, still provide marketing and distribution for them. They also have youth culture on their side.
Jazz still has a certain underground feel, a music played off the main streets of American culture and by the marginal and marginalized. It is a music that languishes if it becomes popular, witness the fusion era and the cool jazz played on easy listening stations. Now, with it’s popularity dwindling again, it can regenerate, offer the lure of the hidden, the cult.
Classical music has a dwindling band of listeners, too, graying as are the jazz audiences. Classical music will find itself refreshed as it, too, becomes the province of smaller gatherings, people devoted to musicology, to the repertoire of yesterday.
Neither of the significant aural art forms will disappear. Yes, the opportunities to hear them may diminish, but there will always be live performances somewhere for both. The availability of recorded and digital music ensures that they will survive until other audiences find them.
(Musical_Instruments Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677)
So it may be that classical music aficionados will attend trios and quartets in performance more than orchestras, though here the SPCO seems to be on firm footing at last. Jazz followers will head to clubs and bars, much as they always have, and to the occasional festival. Performers in both will gain renown in smaller groups, but they will be remembered. Popularity is not the mark of good art, though you can’t deny its value for paying bills.
