Mayday for the music too

WITH all the disturbing images of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, it’s been gratifying to watch the Crescent City’s traditional identity as the birthplace of jazz seep back into the coverage.

Jazz is nothing if not a music that looks trouble in the eye -- and celebrates -- as New Orleanians have been doing for a century at funerals. Not long after the tragedy struck, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival announced that the 2006 event would go on -- somewhere, sometime, somehow.

As it happens, New Orleans -- and images of jazz -- had been on my mind even before the hurricane. On a musician’s recommendation, I rented a film set in the Crescent City, “Tune In Tomorrow” (1990), starring Peter Falk as an unctuous hack who writes radio soap operas that gradually become a bit too true to life. A young Wynton Marsalis, who wrote the score, plays trumpet with his band in several lively scenes.

Needless to say, “Tune In Tomorrow’s” sumptuous sunlit images of French Quarter nightclubs, Garden District mansions and aboveground cemeteries took on new poignancy over the next week, as New Orleans drowned in the storm.

Beyond deepening the sadness of all that was suddenly lost, the film also got me thinking. “Tune In Tomorrow” presents jazz as a joyous, celebratory, expressive and communal backdrop for the pageant of life, from birth to death.

But as images of jazz in mass media go, it’s a real exception. Most films and TV shows today portray jazz as an overintellectualized, remote, abrasive music popular only with loners, hipsters and losers.

In his eloquent announcement last month for “Higher Ground,” a New York benefit for hurricane victims, Marsalis, a New Orleans native and the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, declared, as he often has, that jazz “is important because it’s the only art form that objectifies the fundamental principles of American democracy. That’s why it swept the country and the world representing the best of the United States.”

When Marsalis said jazz “objectifies” democracy, he was merely pointing out the obvious -- that jazz allows each player to have a say (a solo), while also working with the group (the tune). This uniquely American negotiation between the individual and the community has also encompassed several “collisions” between cultures, including the one in New Orleans among Spanish, French, British, West African and American that resulted in jazz. Other cultural blends have followed, including Afro-Cuban jazz, Brazilian jazz and, more recently, alto saxophonist John Zorn’s braiding of jazz and Eastern European melodies into what he calls Radical Jewish Music.

It seems reasonable to ask, given the rich variety of jazz over the years, why the music gets such a generally negative rap in mass media.

‘All over the place’

YOU don’t have to search far to find these demeaning, dismissive images. They’re everywhere.

Take that episode in Season Four of “Sex and the City,” when Carrie Bradshaw dates a goofy jazz bass player named Ray King.

“This might be a good time to tell you,” Carrie confesses, “I don’t like jazz. You can’t follow it. There’s no melody. And it’s just like” -- she throws up her palms, squealing -- “all over the place.”

King (played opposite Sarah Jessica Parker with subtlety by Craig Bierko) isn’t the finger-popping, bongo-slapping solipsist who occasionally turns up on TV as a caricature of a “jazz musician,” but he’s not exactly a catch, either.

Ray moves in a frenzy from one infatuation to the next, madly chopping vegetables, pointing out a walking bass line on an LP -- “this lick right here, man! ... How about that! ... Jesus, that’s sweet” -- unable to focus on anything but the sensual present.

“Do you play all those instruments?” Carrie asks, impressed by his collection. “ ‘Play’ is a little strong,” he answers. “I learn to play a few notes. When I get bored, I move on.”

Though sex with Ray is fantastic -- Hey, why not? Isn’t “jazz” a slang word for sex? -- when she wakes up in an empty bed listening to him finger-picking a banjo in the next room, she concludes that Ray, like jazz, doesn’t quite live up to the vaunted promise of being “spontaneous and unpredictable and thrilling.” He’s “just a guy with ADD.”

Alone again, she passes a sidewalk tenor saxophonist at the foot of the Queensborough Bridge (wrong bridge, but a clever allusion, nevertheless, to Sonny Rollins’ 1959 sabbatical practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge), then confesses in the voice-over, “I still like a song with a melody I can sing to.”

But Carrie’s critique of jazz is gentle compared with the devastating portrayal in the 1996 Cameron Crowe film “Jerry Maguire.” In that romantic comedy, Tom Cruise plays a sports agent who falls in love with a single mom, Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), whose protective male nanny, Chad (Todd Louiso), offers a vicious parody of a spacey jazz fanatic.

When Jerry gets lucky with Dorothy on their first date, there is a comic scene on the porch between Chad and Jerry.

“I want you to use this,” Chad says, reaching into his knapsack and pulling out -- a cassette tape.

“Miles Davis and John Coltrane,” he says sanctimoniously. “Stockholm, 1963. Two masters of freedom, playing at a time before their art was corrupted by a zillion cocktail lounge performers who destroyed the legacy of the only American art form -- jazz.”

Jerry is dumbfounded.

“[I] put some Mingus on there too,” Chad adds. “No barriers, no boundaries.”

Cut to Jerry and Dorothy in bed, as Jimmy Knepper’s raucous trombone solo roars through Charles Mingus’ “Better Git It in Your Soul.”

“What is this music?” Maguire asks.

He and Dorothy collapse into uncontrollable laughter.

What is this music, indeed?

To read these scripts, one would think jazz a kind of holy relic transmitted from an obscure past via obsolete technologies -- LP and cassette -- a paradise lost, accessible only through the intervention of an anointed priest. Lost in space as well as time, jazz is portrayed in these fictions as unmoored from any recognizable social reality. Ray, like Carrie’s image of the music itself, is not only “all over the place” physically; he is unable to answer routine first-date questions about his background without veering into digressions that scramble the narrative of his life. And like the sax player on the street, the music’s practitioners are playing for an empty house.

This is a pretty bleak image of jazz.

Sure, some films -- “The Tic Code,” “Sweet and Lowdown,” “Mo’ Better Blues,” “ ‘Round Midnight” -- portray jazz more sympathetically. But even these jazz-centric movies, like the depressing off-Broadway play “Sideman,” purvey the cliche of the jazz musician as a beautiful loser. (Ken Burns’ PBS documentary “Jazz,” for all its earnest honorifics, may well be the biggest villain of all, having consigned jazz irreparably to the dustbin of vintage black-and-white nostalgia.)

How did jazz become the butt of parodies like this, in a nation whose Congress has declared the music “a rare and valuable national treasure” and whose cultural capital, New York, now boasts the first concert venue in the world specifically devoted to jazz, Frederick P. Rose Hall?

The simplistic answer, of course, is that jazz was branded between World War II and the ‘60s as the music of a drug culture -- first the cool and diffident hipsterism of heroin, then the utopianism of psychedelics -- an image it has never been able to shake. Certainly this is the stereotype Crowe is trading in with his Chad characterization.

But there is something else going on here. Those same postwar years -- a golden era that produced the masterworks of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet and others -- also correspond to the arc of the civil rights movement. For 25 years, jazz carried the moral authority of that struggle, and in some cases -- Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dave Brubeck -- even provided a script for it.

When the civil rights movement ended (or at least that phase of it did), jazz lost its cachet as the music of the social vanguard. The new cutting edge -- feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism -- was swept up by rock, punk and hip-hop, leaving jazz holding a bag of dated slang, old licks and Lenny Bruce jokes about race and sex that were more puzzling than funny to the next generation. Jazz was perceived as something old-fashioned, unattached to contemporary social reality -- a music, as my jazz history students inevitably declare on the first day of class, that their parents (or grandparents) listened to “in smoke-filled nightclubs.”

But that’s not exactly accurate.

For starters, most clubs don’t even allow smoking, and musicians consider “the drug wars,” as they call them, a sad, if colorful, episode from the distant past. Musically, though pundits have repeatedly pronounced it dead, great jazz of all stripes -- often with biting social relevance -- continues to be composed, played, toured and recorded.

I am thinking not only of Marsalis’ ambitious compositions such as “All Rise” and his gorgeously celebratory “Marciac Suite,” but of Zorn’s “Jewish jazz” quartet, Masada, or trumpeter Dave Douglas’ impressive “Witness,” which commemorates writers imprisoned or tortured for their political beliefs. (Douglas’ most recent project, “Keystone,” plunges into the current fascinating reevaluation of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s work.)

In fact, one of the most daunting obstacles for jazz isn’t its scarcity, but its dizzying number of subcategories. (My students also often confess that, before taking the class, they thought “smooth jazz” accounted for the whole genre.)

A new, youthful audience is being groomed for jazz, as well, in the burgeoning jazz-in-the-schools movement, which produces not only young players but future listeners. (One of my biggest rewards as a jazz journalist was a comment from a high school player that newspaper coverage of his band had made it “OK for kids to like jazz.”)

A question of marketing, not art

THE rich multiplicity and social connectedness of contemporary jazz make it clear that it’s the image of the music that’s dated, not the music itself. This is a marketing problem, not an artistic one.

Earlier this year, in response to shockingly low sales of jazz records (less than 3% of the total, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America), a group of industry honchos convened at the Johnson Foundation’s Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wis. Unlike most jazz confabs, where converts preach to the choir, “Raising Market Share for Jazz” invited folks from the outside world -- futurists, marketing consultants, foundation directors and the like -- to generate fresh ideas. One suggestion was to “brand” jazz the way the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign turned sales around for that other all-American product.

Nice idea, maybe.

But before jazz can be “branded” with a more contemporary image, its earnest advocates will have to square off with the false messages already out there -- that the music has lost its bearings in the American cultural narrative. As things stand now, jazz is being portrayed as the butt of a bad joke, not the noble enterprise Marsalis, Douglas -- or the U.S. Congress -- envision. A jazz pessimist might say the game is over: Jazz is just a historicized “classical” music whose heyday has come and gone. It will never regain its topical currency.

A jazz optimistic like myself, on the other hand, might observe that all the giggling going on about jazz in the movies betrays an undercurrent that is quite a bit more promising. We generally don’t laugh about something unless we’re uneasy about it. “Jerry Maguire” and that episode of “Sex and the City,” for all their meanness, also betray a discomfort -- guilt, even -- about what has befallen jazz; a feeling that, as a society, we would still very much like to reach out to a place where black people and white people -- not to mention all the other cultures in our society and the world -- were negotiating their history again. Historically, jazz has been a unique place where that can happen.

If those marketers who met in Wisconsin last May face the situation as it is -- that among the unconverted, jazz is not much more than a joke right now -- and then work from ground up, like the people who are now rebuilding New Orleans, it’s possible that jazz will assume its real, and noble, role again. But first, many more listeners will have to recognize it for what it is: the very best America has to offer. After we do that, we just might find that even Carrie Bradshaw likes jazz a lot more than she thought she did -- as long as she doesn’t have to hang out with Ray King in the bargain.

De Barros is a jazz columnist for the Seattle Times and a regular contributor to Downbeat magazine. Contact him at calendar.letters @latimes.com.