It's a great question.

For me there are two camps.

As you say, there are musicians playing for musicians; they spend time listening, analysing, practising, trying to incorporate all that stuff into their playing with varying degrees of success, and there's so much to take in that it's perhaps not so surprising they don't always get to really say anything. My own playing is deficient enough that I spend more time trying to wrestle with playing music that is "correct" than having chance to think about much else, I spurned my chances to learn properly at a younger age and now as a serious hobbyist trying to make up for all that is hard.

But there are a lot of people (well some - although they're usually pretty full, they're all only very small venues, so 20-30 people can make it busy) that show up to the events I put on purely to listen. I have no idea whether they hear all my clams or not; but I'm actually guessing not.... because they wouldn't come back and say positive things if they did? There is also good attendance at the big bands I play and dep for. Some people turn up to listen, some to dance; I suspect they mostly enjoy the vocal numbers.

There are also plenty of people that turn up to the jazz clubs in my nearest city (Manchester, UK); one in particular is busy most nights. I'm not sure how much of that is for the actual music; but rather the vibe of the place in general. It does seem to me that younger people who like jazz music are almost always musicians.

 

People from out of town

 

These days the younger players exist in a bit of an echo chamber. They don't have the mentorship of an Ellington, Basie, Blakey, etc. Those bands focused on not just mastery of the music, but on entertaining the audience. But today the kids are playing in their college/university bands, playing to impress their teachers and impress and outplay their classmates. When they get to the real world that's really all they know. Their music is technical and "interesting," their technique is superb, but it sounds like a calculus textbook set to music (maybe a bit of hyperbole, but not much.)

I've seen at least a few new album releases where the artist offered bundles with a book of transcriptions of every solo on the new album. That tells me their target audience is other musicians.

Then you have the musicians like Jon Batiste. Technically brilliant, great composer, but his music makes you feel good, makes you want to move, is actually entertaining. I'm sure he can fall into a similar rut as his young colleagues, but for the most part he's very entertaining. You can try to write him off as "commercial," or as a "sell-out," but he's a real entertainer, which I think, should be the goal, especially if you want to get paid for your efforts.

 

"... but sounds like a calculus textbook..." You nailed it! As a long time music educator, I have observed the decades-long evolution of jazz into academic music. But this phenomenon is not exclusive to high school and college jazz bands. The world of "classical" music has experienced a parallel trend. Recitals by music majors are replete with contemporary compositions that stretch the limits of technique and instruments, but are difficult to listen to, and seem devoid of artistry or emotion. Apparently, there is little interest in communicating with the listener, much less actually entertaining an audience.

 

Well, you need to be a lot more specific when you say "jazz".

Are you talking about "trad" where the audience is small but fanatical; or swing where there are still quite active swing dance/lindy hop societies in most large US cities; or traditional bebop where there's little audience, or "Smooth" or "Semi-Smooth/Fusion" which I think still has quite a following; or modern avant-garde in all its varieties, which has a small dedicated audience?

I'd also question that conventional wisdom that "bebop drove jazz underground". It's not really borne out by history. There were a lot of factors in the replacement of jazz as the main pop music, first by singer-pop (think Perry Como), then by R&B and early rock and roll; and bebop was NOT one of the main forces in this. If you look at the landscape of popular music in say 1950, there were still thousands of territory jazz bands working in the swing mode, along with the first wave of Dixieland revivalists, and bebop (and the early West Coast style) was an obscure offshoot of interest to only a few people. The real issue was that the economics no longer supported big bands playing for dancers, and both dancers and listeners were tired of the swing style they'd been listening to since about 1935. It was time for something new; and the something new was first singer-pop, then R&B and rock and roll. Bebop had little to do with the overall shape of the musical entertainment industry.

 

I'd also question that conventional wisdom that "bebop drove jazz underground". It's not really borne out by history. There were a lot of factors in the replacement of jazz as the main pop music, first by singer-pop (think Perry Como), then by R&B and early rock and roll; and bebop was NOT one of the main forces in this. If you look at the landscape of popular music in say 1950, there were still thousands of territory jazz bands working in the swing mode, along with the first wave of Dixieland revivalists, and bebop (and the early West Coast style) was an obscure offshoot of interest to only a few people. The real issue was that the economics no longer supported big bands playing for dancers, and both dancers and listeners were tired of the swing style they'd been listening to since about 1935. It was time for something new; and the something new was first singer-pop, then R&B and rock and roll. Bebop had little to do with the overall shape of the musical entertainment industry.

Yes, one can pretty easily imagine an alternative history in which big band swing (or perhaps "medium band swing") persisted as America's recreational music of choice for another 10 or so years after it faded away in our timeline, with bebop also present as a semi-underground, art music jazz derivative for niche audiences (i.e., the same as in reality). This is in fact exactly what happened with rock music starting in the late 1970s. Mainstream rock continued to enjoy major commercial success for a couple of decades even as highly refined subgenres evolved to please narrower audiences.

 

Jazz study makes for better playing all around, even if you play rock or blues or whatever.

 

The audience for jazz?
The other guys in the combo...

 

I often share this impression when I watch jazzplayers on the bandstand - only looking at each other and murmuring the names of the musicians at the end of the set.
Now if only the other band members would listen.....

 

The statistic below is for Germany 2023 ("I hear Jazz with great pleasure / with pleasure"), splittedd by age classes:

But Jazz is in Germany only for 6,5% the preferred music style.

 

Statistics based on how many that responded? (well, the digit after the comma indicates that it must be more than 100 ...)

 

It is a great question and how to answer it I think really depends on where you live. I live in the NYC Metro Area (Northern NJ) and while the jazz scene is alive an well in NYC, in my part of NJ I'm noticing an uptick in venues that are supporting live jazz music. I recently put together a Jazz Trio (Sax, Keys & Drums) after years of playing bars/clubs/weddings/corporate, etc. and the audience response has been amazing. Besides getting complements on our performances, the biggest takeaway has been that everyone is enjoying listing to jazz standards and not being overwhelmed by a loud band.

Additionally, they find it's a breath of fresh air not hearing the same playlist of cover tunes from the Woodstock area... too many bands cover this stuff and they are really loud. I still freelance with some of these bands and it's getting old playing the same songs... it just a different band's version and in the long run... it's just a gig so take the money and run. I'd rather put my constructive effort into playing & creating musical ideas & performing with other creative musicians while entertaining an audience that is listening and enjoying the music vs a bar crowd that's just wants to party.

 

Honestly, what is Jazz doing to create an audience? Ragtime was great, but the ensemble work out of New Orleans was exciting. And then we had the creation of swing and the Big Band. Which dominated pop for a couple of decades. But an ambitious group of innovators toiled the late hours to create BeBop. And then there was the Cool reaction and the LA Sound. And George Russell‘s theories and then Modal. Free jazz. And then Miles sought to create a whole new young audience with Fusion. And the Europeans responded with an ambient aesthetic. And then?
(Oddly enough, Smooth Jazz made a huge dent in the popular market, granted its limited artistic aspiration.)
But now, outside of some sampling projects, and the likes of Pharoah’s outstanding partnerships with Floating Point’s electronics and the London Symphany, it feels to me more like an homage to past glory. With an audience that is aging out.

 

I worked with a guy 30 years ago who always had music playing softly in the background in his office but never jazz. When I asked him why he said exactly what you just did; "jazz is the music of musicians communicating with other musicians". Once we were past the swing and big era jazz became more of an acquired taste mostly developed by other players.

 

It also depends on whether you mean the audience for people who go out and listen to jazz live. Many will live in areas where this is not even possible. It seems there could be a large audience listening to recorded jazz (albeit much recorded long ago), as with classical. I was recently listening to Frank Morgan’s Easy Living album on YouTube and was heartened to see how many people wrote comments saying they heard about it on “Bosch” and looked it up. A tiny number, maybe. At least they bothered. While I agree with a lot of what has been said and which has been said many times before (academic/technical approaches, demonstrating vs communicating, telling a story vs telling a story which is always “I am a technical firestorm “, etc), I also got to thinking, what could jazz do to build or rebuild its audience and connect better with people? Because I perhaps naively think there is a group of people who would be open to jazz, even if they aren’t currently into it. Or to put it another way, is jazz losing its audience or is it pushing it away?
Lastly, the two sax players I’ve seen live recently who drew in a lot of crowd and got them excited were Kenny Garrett and Francesco Bearzatti. Obviously totally different. But both had the emotion, the drive, and communicated that they were there for the audience (and in Kenny’s case, involved them).
Marketing, music biz, academic influence and all the other stuff we talk about are real challenges. But maybe players themselves can do some good on their own.

 

There is an actual jazz audience in Chicago. Maybe it's just that there's a critical mass with the large and diverse population? I wonder what Houston's jazz scene is like.

 

I am the audience. I go to a lot of jazz shows. Two just last weekend. Sometimes 3 or 4 shows a week.

Jazz in San Diego has had a resurgence of sorts in recent years. Some truly great players, and a variety of good venues.

Still, would be nice if we could get more shows from more touring artists, but SD doesn’t seem to have sufficient pull. Or money.

I once asked Charles McPherson why he doesn’t play more in San Diego (he lives here). He said they just don’t pay enough.

 

I am the audience. I go to a lot of jazz shows. Two just last weekend. Sometimes 3 or 4 shows a week.

Jazz in San Diego has had a resurgence of sorts in recent years. Some truly great players, and a variety of good venues.

Still, would be nice if we could get more shows from more touring artists, but SD doesn’t seem to have sufficient pull. Or money.

I once asked Charles McPherson why he doesn’t play more in San Diego (he lives here). He said they just don’t pay enough.

@nvilletele I wish I was there for Steely Jazz this coming weekend - Tom Scott and Skunk Baxter are on the bill.

http://steelyjazz.com/#tour

 

Who is the current audience for jazz? - other musicians, as has been said. Jazz, at least in the US, is less consumed than classical music and ranks the lowest among genres. In its home country! - sad.

I say this often on this forum: jazz - insofar as it exists as a culture/sub-culture, style, philosophy, attitude, etc. - eschews (derides?) commercial success. I lay this at the feet of the beboppers. Not from a stylistic perspective but rather from an attitudinal one. Bebop was developed "after hours" by cats looking for musical avenues with greater individual expression and technical virtuosity. And, there was a well-documented vein of thought among the bebop progenitors that bebop be so virtuosic and harmonically complex that White musicians couldn't steal it and thus commercialize it to White audiences (make $$$). There was an element of resentment, quite understandably, toward the commercial success of "White bands" among some Black musicians of the era (i.e., White bands playing Black music to White [wealthy] audiences at White-only clubs while Black musicians were not afforded similar opportunities for commercial success). Obviously this is wrapped-up in racial segregation, economic disparity, and other not-flattering characteristics of racial relations in the US in the early/mid-20th century.

So, for me, it's not that bebop ruined the party due to the style, it's that bebop was created and developed without consideration for commercial success (i.e., jazz became an "art music"). Other, non-racial factors, were at play, too: namely WWII (conscription) and the '42 - '44 instrumental recording band. By the time swing bands recovered from the war and the industry recovered from the ban, Americans had moved-on and swing was viewed by young people as "pre-war" music (recall how cataclysmic an event WWII was!). Not to say that America had moved on to bebop - although it did achieve some commercial success - but Americans had certainly moved on to other sounds: "race music" (RnB), country blues, small-group jazz, cool jazz, gospel, etc. And from a commercial perspective, why would clubs pay to bring-in a massive swing band when a hot 7-8 piece group could also pack the place? Then it was only a few short years (1953) that Bill Haley would hit the charts with rock 'n' roll/rockabilly. Elvis followed the next year.

Swing didn't die completely immediately after WWII. Basie, for example, briefly disbanded (2-3 years) in the early-'50s before creating the "Second Testament" band and the great records that followed w/ Hefti, Quincy Jones, etc. By the '60s, however, swing was "Vegas music" (i.e., your parents' [or grandparents'!] music). Obviously there are still some "ghost bands" operating today, but they subsist by playing 300 dates per year.

In sum: once swing faded from American consciousness there just wasn't an emphasis among those in the genre on commercial acceptance - by design. And, due to that, jazz in its entirety largely faded from American consciousness by 1965 (arguably sooner, ~1960). There are notable exceptions: Louis outsells the Beatles with "Hello, Dolly!", Stan Getz wins a Grammy for Getz/Gilberto, the Tijuana Brass tops the chart a few times, Chuck Mangione in '70s, Kenny G, and some others - but none of that was considered the "hippest" jazz happening at the time. To the contrary, most of it was "throwback" or "old" jazz.

 

The majority of the public does not like to listen to music without a discernible melody. That is why smooth jazz is popular.

 

It's also why vocal jazz is more popular than instrumental jazz.

 

Oh great, yet another "Jazz is Dead" thread. We really needed that here.

The truth is that there's not much of a market for any saxophone music (nor much of one for any non-vocal music).

If your primary concern is the size of the audience, then you should stay far away from both jazz and the saxophone. In any case, I don't see anything inherently more "selfish" in jazz musicians playing the music that they and other musicians enjoy than in playing more popular (and more profitable) music. That logic is analogous to claiming that producers of documentaries are somehow more selfish than producers of blockbuster films simply because the latter draw a larger audience.

 

Jazz isn't any more dead than classical music, ballet, Morris dancing, contra dancing, plein aire painting, large format film photography, cross-stitch embroidery, or any number of other pastimes and interests. Yes, jazz was integral to American popular music for a brief period from about 1930 to 1945 or so. Even then, while the popular music of American youth was closer to high quality jazz than ever before or since, MOST popular music was put out by bad knockoffs of the Glenn Miller band, with relatively little quality jazz content in the output. The number of people who were digging Chick Webb and Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet and Earl Hines was still a fraction of the total.

But just because the social phenomena that gave jazz and closely-jazz-adjacent music mass popularity in that period are gone, and jazz is now a niche art form, doesn't make it dead. I think it's time for all of us who love the music to GET OVER the fact that between 90 and 75 years ago it was real popular and it hasn't been so since.

 

I hope that it survives. I sure love it.

Not only is it music for musicians, but I’m afraid that it has become music for jazz musicians. That’s from exchanging music with musician friends and asking for their honest opinion. You might be surprised at how many just don’t get it.

 

In the car I listen to the local jazz station, so I am in the "jazz audience".

Pop or classical might emotionally connect to me and I don't want that while driving ... the virtuoso kazoo music seems to work better as background noise.

Once in a while I recognize Miles Davis or Sanborn but otherwise nothing I hear seems to mean anything. Very simple tunes repeated over and over with some sort of complex added layer of related music nailed on using drums.

 

Hip cats and cool chicks.

 

all I know is that the two clubs I play, sporadically, in NYC are always packed to the walls - Smalls and Dizzy's. And there are festivals everywhere (and let's not forget Europe - when i play in Denmark the places are always packed, and most of them have no idea who I am).

 

The only problem I can see with the jazz audience is that many of us are wannabe jazz players. Mediocre to really competent players are not able to support themselves playing jazz. It's only the really, really great players that do it for a living.

 

So we have to take into account that music is a social phenomenon it exists inside and is part of attached to a social milieu both time stamped and geographically attached so it's about the people who live at the time and place where the given music is being made. Change 1890-1930 New Orleans ... no Stachmo change 1930-45 NYC no Bird no Monk no Miles (I am not a historian so please allow me some poetic slack thanks).

So the question is what's going on today? Certainly not the firebrand trail blazer individuals who exploded in jazz music in the 20's-40's. OR HAVE I MISSED THEM? I am an older guy I saw Miles I saw Monk I saw Mingus Muddy Dizzy and Hendrix and the Btls so honestly I cannot "find" the scene now because back then it was word of mouth, person to person, vibes going around in a room musicians searching for musical and spiritual answers, this was serious stuff, Coltrane's Love Supreme was an experience that took the listener somewhere "impossible" higher than high.

So today we have much less person to person, very sad for a culture, we have maniacal greed and mass consumption that is beyond anything imaginable even 20 years ago. We have the internet. I recall as a novice piano player going to NYC to try to find some underground sets. You had to go to the village and ask people or musicians carrying horns hey man where is that Sam Rivers set going on? And you'd eventually get the answer. You had people who grew up in the most impossible ways finding their voices as a trial by fire. Ornette was so hated by many he got beat up and his tenor smashed. But then he got his white alto and changed the world. Things in the past were very very real for many many jazz musicians and let's be clear here the prime source of the music is African American and how many of us had slaves for great grandparents or even ex-slave grand parents?

What is jazz today? Where is the audience? Jazz was originally a message, a way of life, a savior, a devil, but in all cases it came from the social milleu which was a struggling people confronted with challenges of life and death seriousness. Non Afro American players never were confronted with those same realities but because they were brilliant musicians and ardent devotees of the masters they transcended the racial aspects and played heart felt music which is the essence of jazz.

And what is the message today? Times change. Empires rise and fall. Maybe you will be the one to find the voice of today. I hope to God you do...

 

Call me a 'mouldy fig', but bebop killed jazz, in my opinion. Jazz was about entertaining an audience (check out the audience at a Tuba Skinny gig). Bebop shifted the emphasis to the performer, and lost touch with the audience, somewhat.

 

I really doubt it; that's exactly what the older bebop players said about free jazz. Look at pictures of the old jazz clubs from the mid '40s when bebop started. Those places were packed. Also, even concert halls (Bird in '47 or '48) were filled. Kenton did massive tours. I mean, it's never been a pop audience, but to say bebop killed jazz is like saying talkies killed film. Aside from everything else, this is an art music, and it had to change.

 

Instrumental pop music is not jazz. That applies to big band, swing, dance, or smooth. There’s nothing wrong with it but generally speaking, it’s not jazz. It’s pop music…..just without vocals. It’s never been the music of the masses.

 

Jazz, with and without vocals, was THE popular music for about 2 decades…Swinging Big Bands.
Instrumental Swing Pop Music

“Popular” music, regardless of style, most often involves either:
A “fashionable” dance beat or…
Some form of melodic hook or raw lyrical sentimentality.

Invariably, there are vocals. The vocalist & lyrics are what most non-musicians “hear” almost exclusively.

Modern jazz generally has none of this, so it’s a niche musical style & not “popular.”