Tensions in the Marketplace

Reflections on the Major Recording Companies Documentation of Jazz in the late 1990s and New Millennium Years

Authors

  • Stuart Nicholson Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/source.v2i1.77

Keywords:

jazz, jazz musicians, history of jazz, modern jazz

Abstract

The survival of jazz has to be seen in the context of today’s increasingly complex infrastructure of profitmaximizing multinationals whose homogenizing tendencies are at odds with the music’s inherent complexity. Jazz no longer has the kind of mass market appeal that is attractive to the majors so in order for the music to survive in a niche market where audiences appreciate instrumental creativity, it has to evolve beyond the jazz tradition and embrace the kind of radical processes of evolution which musical forms undergo. Unless contemporary musicians move beyond the paradigm of traditional orthodoxies they could well, by most definitions at least, be participating in something that is closer to a folk form rather than an art form - interesting to witness live, but, as the 1990s return to the certainties of hard bop demonstrated, when the music is in competition with the past, the past will always win because the original artists are seen to be the source of ‘authenticity.’ When music - or any art form - becomes a refuge from the present, from facing up to the world today, then its force is diminished; it becomes an embalmed corpse, beautiful to behold but ultimately inert.

Author Biography

  • Stuart Nicholson, Author

    Stuart Nicholson’s piece for The Source is based in part on views expressed in his latest book Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To A New Address) , published in September 2005 by Routledge. He is the author of five other books on jazz and the only jazz writer outside the United States to have received two "Notable Book of the Year" citations from The New York Times Review of Books.

References

-

Downloads

Published

2005-03-01

Issue

Section

Jazz on Record

How to Cite

Nicholson, S. (2005). Tensions in the Marketplace: Reflections on the Major Recording Companies Documentation of Jazz in the late 1990s and New Millennium Years. Jazz Research Journal, 2(1), 77-82. https://doi.org/10.1558/source.v2i1.77