The City of Jazz does not have any specific geographical location. It is anywhere and everywhere, wherever you can hear the soul … Europe, Asia, North and South America, the world digs this burg. – Duke Ellington in “Music Is My Mistress” (Da Capo, 1973)
For four days last week, the John B. Hynes Convention Center here became the City of Jazz, with more than 4,000 performers, teachers, students, managers and broadcasters schmoozing, arguing, gossiping, selling, buying, hustling and otherwise reveling in the music and the business known as jazz.
Sparks flew, and not simply on stage. During clinics, panel discussions and other forums, the forces converging on the annual conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators proved that beneath its sunny exterior, the City of Jazz harbors a variety of storms.
Neglect of aging jazz masters, widespread discrimination against women, alleged exploitation of artists by record companies, insensitivity or ignorance (depending on whom you believe) from the National Endowment for the Arts-a whole litany of woes, accusations and counter-accusations apparently has accompanied the recent resurgence of the jazz industry.
“The social and economic conditions of the jazz musician are rarely talked about in public, but their problems are real,” said Herb Storfer, president of a New York musicians’ aid organization called Jazz Foundation of America, at one of the week’s more disturbing seminars.
Stofer then showed a harrowing video portraying the plight of once-revered jazz musicians tossed aside by the very music industry that profited from their labors. “All too often,” intoned the voice on the video, “we know (the artists) by their high times. … all too often, high times turn into musical and human tragedy.”
Case in point: Bassist Herman Wright played with Count Basie’s band, recorded with tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt, avant-gardist Yusef Lateef, pianist-composer George Shearing and singer Abbey Lincoln, to name only a few of the stars who relied on his talents.
Unfortunately for Wright, the rise of synthesizers and other electronic technology in the ’80s wiped out the commercial and studio work that represented a major source of his income. When the JFA heard about Wright’s plight, he didn’t have enough money to pay the phone company, which was about to shut off his service.
Case in point: Drummer Earl “Buster” Smith, a mainstay in the ground-breaking bands of Sun Ra. When Ra died last year after decades leading his brilliant Arkestra, Smith found that he was too old to be hired by anyone else and thus unable to support himself.
The indignities-and worse-suffered by these two performers, and others like them, fueled much discussion throughout this conference, particularly in light of the commercial success that major record labels such as Columbia, RCA, Warner Bros., Atlantic and Blue Note have enjoyed in marketing jazz recordings in recent years.
That each of these labels, and others, achieve their greatest profit margins by reissuing vintage jazz recordings (for which production costs were covered decades ago) only underscores the irony of the situation: Just as the major jazz labels produce handsome, expensive packages of jazz reissues, many of the sidemen on those sessions can’t make the phone bill.
“The record labels should see how they can assist jazz artists,” veteran trumpeter/jazz educator Jimmy Owens told a panel of record executives who had opened the floor to questions. Some of the best musicians in jazz, said Owens, “don’t even get buried in a grave with a marker.
“(Singer) Bessie Smith was buried in a grave like that for years-until Janis Joplin paid for a marker. Some of our greatest artists are in paupers’ graves.”
The record execs-from GRP, Blue Note, Elektra and the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences-nodded in agreement but made no comment.
Quickly, pianist and jazz advocate Billy Taylor jumped into the fray, but from another vantage point.
“I’m very concerned about what the record companies are doing for (music) education on the elementary level,” said Taylor, a veteran jazz educator. “I would hope you would make videos, make records and make any artists available (to perform) on the elementary level.
“I did it in New York when we started the JazzMobile (a jazz band on wheels that ventured into inner-city neighborhoods), and the kids turned out, believe me.”
These exhortations were mild, however, compared with the rage and despair expressed by a panel of women who have forged nascent careers in jazz despite continuous obstacles. Indeed, the very sight of a panel of women proved startling, since most of the IAJE panels were overwhelmingly male.
“In elementary school, when they were handing out instruments, I wanted the drums,” recalled Maggie Hyman, a jazz artist and member of the Women Musicians Coalition.
“But my teacher-who was a woman-said, `No, that’s not what a girl should play.’
So she played piano.
Once Hyman entered the Berklee School of Music, a well-known Boston institution, she figured that things would have improved. She was wrong.
“Even at Berklee,” said Hyman, “I still didn’t see women instructors” in areas such as arranging, composing, bandleading, theory and other traditionally male bastions.
“Mostly, the women instructors at Berklee were vocalists and pianists,” added Hyman, pointing to the two areas to which women in jazz traditionally have been consigned.
None of the issues or panels, however, generated as much open hostility as the session innocuously titled “The National Endowment for the Arts: Federal Funding for Jazz.” The NEA representatives may have expected routine questions about how to fill out this application or that one, but most of the jazz professionals in the house took on the NEA with fists bared.
“Where do you get those panels (who dole out the grants)?” asked the first questioner, a veteran musician. “Those panelists don’t know anything about music.”
NEA official Roger Oliver glowered at the man, while Oliver’s NEA colleague, Jan Stunkard, insisted that the panels are “knowledgeable.”
A young musician in the audience then pointed out that although he already had launched his career, he would treasure a grant to study with a veteran jazz virtuoso. When the NEA officials told him that the grants were for “aspiring” artists, the musician pointed out the irony:
“So if I make myself look good on the application,” he said, “then I’m actually hurting myself,” since a strong resume would suggest that he’s no longer “aspiring.” The best way to get the grant, he added, would be to mask his accomplishments, a strange way indeed to apply for NEA support.
There were other memorable moments, particularly a panel discussion in which Jazz at Lincoln Center director Rob Gibson objected to a practice that is becoming ever more popular in jazz: Musicians are playing vintage jazz solos precisely as the original artists recorded them. Better to improvise a solo in the style of the period than to ape something so ephemeral as a solo improvisation, Gibson said.
“But (trumpeter) Fats Navarro did the same solo” every time he improvised a number, said Indiana University music professor David Baker. Gibson tried to make the point that no solo is the same every time, and that even if it were, it’s one thing for an artist to reiterate his own solo, and another for someone else to mimic it, but the panel drowned him out.
Finally, Jeffrey Gusman, an attorney and musician who’s executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America, startled even jaded ears when he said that Sam Moore (of the ’60s pop duo Sam and Dave) received only a lump-sum royalty of $2,285 and a monthly payment of $73 for his top-of-the-chart recordings.
Moore has filed a lawsuit in Georgia that likely will be part of a larger, class-action suit charging that record companies systematically under-reported sales figures since 1958-to the tune of $7 billion.
Stormy weather, indeed, in the City of Jazz.
