Was 2002 the year that jazz became seriously cool and hip? With jazz attracting a younger audience, receiving extensive BBC coverage and featuring in movie soundtracks, has America's 'lowbrow' music finally made the grade?
'The growth curve for jazz audiences has been stratospheric in recent times," says Gerry Godley, artistic director of the IMC (Improvised Music Company). "It's bucking the trend of declining attendance of other, more established areas of the performing arts."
Ticket sales of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival's Winter Weekender in November exceeded expectations significantly and, says Godley, the buzz of excitement and musical curiosity around the events was remarkable. Audiences, it seems, can't get enough of jazz. Ben Jackson, artistic director of Note Productions, the independent jazz promoter, noticed increased demand for Note's Autumn Season ESB Jazz Series. "There has been a phenomenal surge in public interest in jazz over the last couple of years," he says. "A large market for jazz has been developed and we expect audiences to continue growing for several years to come."
Jazz is currently the most popular live music attraction in the UK - and has suddenly acquired the cachet of being "cool and hip" - according to the market research agency, Mintel. Robbie Williams is around £80 million richer thanks to the success of his jazzy Frank Sinatra homage Swing When You're Winning, Will Young and rock icon Rod Stewart are using swinging jazz rhythms on their current albums, Radiohead's latest album has trumpeter Humphrey Littleton guesting and, despite a widely acknowledged depression in music retailing, jazz singer Diana Krall's The Look of Love is approaching sales of three million.
"I don't think it's a great secret that jazz is now attracting the 25 to 35 year olds with high net disposable income," Jackson says. It's not the size of the audience but who the audience is, that is the key to this current resurgence. Jazz's true believers have been joined by young professionals who have discovered the music as they shed the pop-music loyalties of their youth. "It provides a perfect canvas on which to hang their aesthetic aspirations and express their new affluence and metropolitan attitude," says Godley. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue currently sells 2,500 copies a week, every week. One of the great jazz albums of all time is also the perfect accompaniment to a dinner party or making love.
The kind of demographic that jazz now attracts has not gone unnoticed by big business. Starbucks has a jazz-only policy in its coffee houses, many airlines feature jazz as an in-flight entertainment option and Coffee Republic broadcasts Jazz FM in all its outlets. Advertisers have also picked up on the new cachet jazz enjoys - cult jazz singer Billie Holiday was featured on a soundtrack advertising expensive German cars, while Jools Holland currently dashes off the riffs to the big-band hit Tuxedo Junction in an advert for a Scottish whisky.
There was a time when Holland would have run a mile rather than be associated with jazz. "It's crap and it's boring," he once said. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, jazz's appeal did not extend far beyond its traditional audience.
With young American musicians playing in the adopted voices of jazz's posthumous heroes of the 1950s and 1960s, this retro-jazz was curiously unmoving and appeared to be a music played by musicians for musicians. Punk rock's claim that jazz's instrumental proficiency was inauthentic, associating skill with glibness, did not seem wide of the mark. Indeed, one rock band even called itself Johnny Hates Jazz.
WITHOUT the universality of pop or the cultural capital of classical music, jazz suffered an identity crisis; a music of vernacular origins with high art pretensions, it was considered too arty for pop fans and too artisan for classical audiences. Caught between the two, jazz appeared off-message in an age when plainly labelled packaging sold. Gradually that has all changed and today Holland even plays the big jazz festivals with his Jazz and Blues Orchestra.
Helped by a crisis in pop music, which, like all crises in pop music, is a universal confession that no one can see where the music is going or what the audience wants, it is the manufactured boy and girl bands barely able to last beyond one album that are now seen as "inauthentic" or "glib". With the record business in one of its periodic troughs, amid all the uncertainty, one certainty prevails: the past sells. This trend is only too plain in the number of recent cover versions of 1960s and 1970s hits; "older" music is now contemporary music for young and old, helping to open the door to jazz.
Increased interest in the music has been influenced by Hollywood's use of jazz to signify "cool and hip", the ultimate urban attitude. Suave loner-at-home Clint Eastwood relaxes to Miles Davis's trumpet in In the Line of Fire, a group of high school children are intellectually awakened to Davis's music in Pleasantville and in Runaway Bride, Julia Roberts gives Richard Gere an original vinyl copy of Davis's Kind of Blue. In The Talented Mr Ripley, the doomed hero rattles off a stunning jazz trumpet solo, while the soundtrack of Finding Forester makes extensive use of classic contemporary jazz recordings by the likes of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis.
Ultimately, however, the cultural resistance jazz encountered as another agency of US globalisation capable of swamping local culture, in the way the hamburger has helped to obliterate local cuisine, has begun to disappear. This is because the music has increasingly become expressive of local identity. There is now a significant difference between, say, Norwegian jazz or Dutch jazz and some Irish jazz too, as musicians use elements of their own cultural background to colour the music. Significantly, the best of these "local" versions are not only different to current US jazz, they are often more interesting.
Last year, the BBC mounted unprecedented coverage of the London Jazz Festival with more than 40 hours of the festival recorded for broadcast on radio and television. After 80 years of largely ignoring the music comes an acknowledgement that jazz now matches the BBC's notion of musical culture. It has tradition, history, an air of permanence plus "added value", highbrow appeal from a lowbrow art form. More especially, the audience the music attracts is now being courted to boost the ratings of under-achievers Radio 3 and the digital TV channel, BBC Four.
Jazz may be cool and hip, but it also has a powerful brand image which business is prepared to buy into. "It can only be good for the future of the music," says Godley. "We could be on the cusp of a renaissance to rival the amazing strides jazz made during the last century. The time seems right."
