Maybe it’s different around the world but where I live it is EXCLUSIVELY the purview of yuppie rich kids who go to fancy music schools. There is not a non-white person in sight. It’s also completely male dominated and most of those males are completely terrible with women (based on stories I’ve heard from femmes in that scene).
Like yeh they’re talented musicians but they’re insufferable and it’s classist and sexist and just gives me the ick big time. They colonised jazz folks.
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Through academification, Jazz is treated like a 2000-year old rigid mathematical framework that you need to practice correctly for 15 years before you’re allowed to speak on it. The priests training to do this need $5000-$20,000 for their instrument(s), a private tutor for a decade, band camp every summer for 4-6 years, experience in 3-5 ensembles, and then a bachelor’s degree in music at minimum, so about $30k or so just for the music classes part. Then and only then can you truly appreciate the theory of “Charlie Parker improvised using registers” and, “Jazz is about knowing when to play the wrong note, honky”.
Non-digital musical instruments of any kind are less in reach for non rich people now than before. The instruments themselves are expensive, many schools have axed music programs, and extracurricular lessons are not cheap.
They de-woked my jazz
I’m surprised how jazz is treated academically. Original jazz was just “These are the instruments we have and if we have a singer, they’ll sing whatever they know.” You’d think modern jazz would be the same where people just play whatever using whatever.
Too Many Zoos isn’t bad if you wanna hear some more modern jazz. Their drummer is black.
I’m taking a jazz group class that’s run by the local jazz center and is open to people aged 15+. With about 15 of us there is good femme representation, including three transfemmes, but only white people (hopefully that changes in the next quarter). A few instructors are not white, though, so at least there’s that. I also remember a lot of good jazz in the past few years being put out by non-white people and I’m going to see a non-white femme performer this weekend.
To be fair, I’m not “in the scene” by any means. I’m just a little baby musician in a small-mid size city with its own little thing going on completely separate from NYC and such and it’s pretty nice here.
I might be wrong, but Wynton and Branford Marsalis are partially to blame for jazz becoming more of an “academic” thing to study at university music programs.
Which is funny because the one time I saw Wynton Marsalis in concert he acknowledged the lack of women and encouraged young women to get more involved. He’s probably oblivious to the negative effect he had on everything. There needs to be more—dare I say it—DEI in jazz education.
That’s why Hiromi stays winning.
I wish we could go back to jazz cocktail bars. Such a scene.
I can’t speak to IRL jazz scenes because I’m not a grass-toucher, but Emmet Cohen’s guests are not just a bunch of white dudes (he’s based out of Harlem). NYC is the jazz scene though, so it’s probably not representative of how other scenes are since everyone flocks to NYC
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
