Jazz on a late summer's day

In a piece headlined 'Can Jazz Be Saved?' Terry Teachout reviews some of the indices showing that the music's audience is both ageing and declining. It turns out, despite the headline, that what he's thinking about is not the actual death or disappearance of jazz, but its transformation - already well on the way to being behind us - from a popular form into a form of high art, high culture, like classical music, or the theatre, or ballet. And yet Teachout ends by saying that jazz musicians who want to keep their beautiful music 'alive and well' have got to figure out 'how to pitch it to young listeners'. I hope they can succeed in doing that. At the same time, what other advertisement can there be for a type of music than itself? And can any musical tradition, any genre, any mode, protect its future from the inevitability of the generations? Which is that each of these wants its own symbols and departures, its fresh cultural adventures. No one wants to be bound, even if they are influenced, by the musical tastes of their parents. Only after we had Elvis and Buddy Holly did I start listening to Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk.