Venue: Highline Ballroom (NY)
Date: June 27, 2012.
Text by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
Is jazz “really” dead? In 1975, when an angry, bitter and maybe exaggerating Miles Davis declared “Jazz is dead (it’s) the music of a museum,” I felt the same — especially when Fusion jazz and later Smooth jazz became very popular and very commercial, thus changing jazz into elevator and background music. Jazz became music that was “easy” to listen to and very accessible. Bored of that kind of music my interest went to American free jazz and to international jazz, such as European, Asian, African and Latin jazz.
As a jazz lover, I can say that this music has become stagnant, especially over the last twenty years. There’s no shortage of talented musicians out there, but jazz in America has gone decades without producing an artist capable of reinventing the genre the way Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, my mentor Ornette Coleman and many others did.
