Rich was not only a great jazz musician. He was a great advocate and ambassador of jazz. He had to be because by 1971, when that particular episode of the Mike Douglas Show aired, jazz was already experiencing its great decline in popularity that would eventually see it almost disappear in the '70s. Jazz artists who wanted to be heard, who wanted to make a living commensurate with their talents, had to play some other kind of music to even survive. And who could blame them? Who could blame George Benson, who was one of the greatest jazz guitarists of his generation, for recording the album Breezin', which is marked the beginning of a movement of jazz musicians turning their backs on straight ahead jazz and playing a watered down, commercialized music instead, music that David Sanborn called "instrumental pop."
Jazz is the greatest musical idiom of the 20th century. With classical music in decline, and symphony orchestras surviving only on public fund drives, listeners who wanted to hear how a musical intelligence responded to their times, instead of to the music of composers long dead, found in jazz a worthy alternative. In the 1930s and '40s Swing music was the most popular musical genre. It wasn't exactly jazz, but it was heavily influenced by jazz and waz the closest that jazz ever came to being America's popular music. After the war, as the big bands were broken up, musicians turned to smaller combos in smaller clubs. Be-Bop created the form that jazz would take into the '60s, until some of them went too far, either into experimental free jazz that left most listeners behind in the dust, or fusion jazz that corrupted the form by trying to incorporate different idioms like funk.
The jazz music that survives today is Post-Bop, and sounds like a somewhat ossified form that is a throwback to the '60s. But at least jazz is still alive. Not long ago, I heard, or thought I'd heard, a staggering statistic - that sales of jazz albums worldwide constituted only 3% of total album sales. If that weren't saddening enough, what I came up with in my statistical search* made me at least twice as sad. In the U.S., where jazz was invented, the amount of the album total in 2017 was 1.2%. Of the twenty music genres, jazz was ranked tenth, after "Religious" (2.9%). What a kick in the head. It made me wonder what Buddy Rich would've said. He probably would've said that jazz was his religion.
But then I noticed that "Classical" music was even less popular, ranked 12th at 1.1%, with Blues and Folk music barely registering at 18th and 19th place, each with 0.4% of total sales. So, altogether, what I regard as the most challenging and most authentic music genres constituted a total of 3.1% of album sales in the U.S. Country music, which Buddy Rich couldn't resist ridiculing, is ranked 5th, with 8.1% of total sales. By far, the three most popular genres, constituting 56.9% of total sales, are Rock (22.2%), Rap/Hip Hop (17.5%) and Pop (17.2%).
I'm not going to waste time splitting hairs trying to define the differences between the genres, even if all three of the top sellers are technically all "Pop". The Beatles, for example, were a Pop band, as The Rolling Stones, their closest competitor, made abundantly clear. And while there is some serious Hip Hop music, most of Rap is so aggressively and disgracefully misogynistic that Wynton Marsalis, the unofficial contemporary ambassador for jazz, and for African-American contributions to music, often has to struggle against the image of black music that Rap/Hip Hop presents to the world.
And the argument that the top three genres appeal primarily to the uninformed musical tastes of the young doesn't hold up, since Rock has been around for more than sixty years and the generation of performers from what was the greatest era of Rock music, the 1970s, is already starting to die out. Rock originated as watered-down R & B, but has since moved into several sub-genres of its own. (R & B, which is at least true to its origins, out-sells Country at 8.7% of total album sales.)
Country has never made sense to me, unless it was when Ray Charles borrowed it with songs like "Georgia On My Mind" and "You Don't Know Me." Some have claimed its origins were in the Blues, like every other American musical genre. If there's a trace of the Blues in Country, I can't hear it. It appeals, exclusively it appears, to Red State white folks.
The statistics don't lie, but what if the list were turned upside down? Jazz would then be ranked 11th, but at least the worst music would be on the bottom where it belongs. But there has never been a clear correlative - except in the tiny minds of businessmen - between what sells and what's good.
If one were to limit oneself just to one instrument - the piano - the number and variety of talented Jazz pianists is daunting. Whether it's the technical brilliance of Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock or the idiosyncratic genius of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner, there is so very much to hear, and hear again and again in the extraordinary recordings from the 1950s and '60s. Jazz wasn't the heavily orchestrated sound of Gordon Jenkins and Nelson Riddle, although they were a part of it. It was musicians creating every time they went onstage something out of thin air - the same air you were breathing if you were lucky enough to be in the club on the night they performed. The recordings were sometimes single takes, but sometimes there were alternate takes that demonstrate just how freely they could improvise. When John Coltrane launched into his saxophone solo, and it lasted sometimes ten or fifteen minutes, his drummer, Elvin Jones, would sometimes have to bring him back down to earth by tapping the rim of a drum. I was just a boy when Coltrane died, but I still think of his music as the music of my age. To not know it, to not respond to the challenge it presents to the listener, is to be wilfully ignorant. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have an appetite for exaltation. So what if Jazz is such a lonely and private place by now?
* The statistics can be found here.
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