BLOGS

As I ride home from work at night or cruise along the highway on a weekend, I generally like to turn the radio to my local smooth jazz radio station (WVSU-FM, Birmingham, AL). It's broadcast both through traditional FM radio and is streamed globally online from the campus of Samford University located in the Birmingham area. It's the nerve center of everything jazz related in Birmingham and other parts of Alabama. Every year there are jazz concerts in various parks all across Metro Birmingham.

I considered myself fortunate to be able to listen to jazz regularly in my region. However, I started to realize that I was one of the few people my age that seemed to appreciate jazz. I'm 29. I've been attending as many jazz concerts as possible in my area, but when I look around I'm one of the few people of my generation who seems to be there. And this has been at jazz events that were free as well as jazz events that I had to pay to get into. So I started doing some research as to what was going on.

One thing I realized is that most people were not exposed to jazz. How could they be exposed, if jazz was something that is not regularly heard on the airwaves these days? In the United States, there are currently 18 stations that play jazz cuts consistently. That's counting AM and FM stations together. If you're in a region that has one of these jazz radio stations and avid fans of jazz who support, great! If you're not in a region that has a jazz scene then you have one of two choices:

1. Spend money for Sirius XM satellite radio to gain access to their jazz stations or;

2. Find streaming radio stations on the Internet.

As a young jazz lover you're kind of in the musical wilderness when a lot of your associates are excitedly discussing the latest album by Drake while you're more hyped up about Bob Baldwin's new album. Now this is not an argument about whether Drake or Bob Baldwin is better. They are two artists in two different genres. Drake raps and Bob Baldwin does jazz. It's just saying that Drake's media exposure is more broad than Bob Baldwin's. Drake gets sponsored by Sprite while Bob Baldwin gets sponsored by whoever he can get.

The corporate entities tend to push radio music that is going to easily sell to teenagers and young adults. You hear the Top 40 songs (pop/hip hop/country/R&B), they are generally about 3 to 4 minutes long with simple catchy beats and lyrics that stick in your head for days on end. You can sell a ton of advertisement in between Top 40 songs. A typical Top 40 song can be generally written and recorded in a few hours. Jazz on the other hand is not something you can easily chop down into a 3 minute song.

That's even with the smooth jazz format, which was originally designed for making jazz more accessible to people. Jazz takes time to record, and requires musicians who have practiced years on instruments. Many public schools no longer have music programs so it is harder to train students (especially those in the middle and lower income levels) in various forms of instruments and vocals.

Those who are able to get music lessons are generally in more affluent families who can afford the instruments and music lessons. So that kind of makes the scene of jazz look like something that only old rich people can afford to perform and participate in.  

Is there hope for jazz? Will it be relegated to the storage closets of history as a quaint American musical form created by black people that was once loved by many? Can there be a resurrection of jazz? Can jazz coexist on a large scale with other musical genres? Only time will tell. But I can tell you this. I'll keep listening one way or the other.

I'll turn on my radio in my car after work and pretend that I'm some handsome private eye on the way to solve a case. I'll keep getting exited when I hear jazz notes in a movie or being sampled in a song. And I'll keep sharing when I can with others about the joys of jazz. Hopefully in the future somebody flying through space will throw on a Grover Washington Jr. album as they fly fearlessly throughout the galaxy.

In the immortal words of Spike Spiegel, one of the main characters in the classic anime sci fi series Cowboy Bebop (which has a ton of jazz in it's soundtrack), "See you later Space Cowboy."