For anyone who treasures great music in the American vernacular-specifically jazz, classic pop songs, landmark musical theater-the advent of the CD represented a kind of deliverance.
For roughly 20 years (’60s to the ’80s), brilliant jazz musicians, pop singers and songwriters gradually were being banished from the recording scene. The international record conglomerates, tantalized by the possibility of unprecedented worldwide profits, turned to music favored by teenagers-rock.
Thus, by the ’70s, sophisticated singers such as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney were without record contracts; virtuosos such as clarinetist Buddy De Franco couldn’t find work playing their music; sublime songwriters such as Mitchell Parish (who penned the lyrics to “Star Dust”) simply stopped writing.
Who would have predicted that a small, silver disc could turn everything around? Yet that’s essentially what happened.
With the advent of the CD, record companies found themselves hard-pressed to turn out enough product to meet swiftly rising demand. Out of necessity, they looked in their vaults and found long-forgotten jazz and pop masterpieces.
The reissues were cheap to produce (since the master tapes were already paid for and ready to go), and they caught on. Single-album reissues and historic boxed sets devoted to the life’s work of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Robert Johnson and others sold in the hundreds of thousands.
For jazz lovers, there was an added stroke of luck in the emergence of Wynton Marsalis, whose spectacular career coincided with the rise of the CD. Here was a handsome, articulate, twenty-something artist who could reach young record buyers, inspire young musicians to turn to jazz and make the rest of the world sit up and pay attention, as well.
Sure enough, Marsalis started racking up Grammys, meanwhile proclaiming unabashedly that he refused to “bow down before the altar of rock.”
Buoyed by the rise of the CD, the charisma of Marsalis and a growing new audience, jazz began to enjoy a renassiance that’s still underway.
That’s not to say, of course, that all is well. In jazz, a generation of middle-aged artists has been mostly ignored by major labels. In musical theater, for every exhaustive restoration of “Porgy and Bess” or “Show Boat,” there’s a “Lady, Be Good,” in which the producers didn’t bother to record the entire Gershwin score.
Still, there’s no denying that for the first time in decades, America’s most sophisticated music is back-with a vengeance.
