I'm Movin' on Up

Jazz is dead in America.  Thoroughly I enjoyed playing it, when it was alive.  Possibly Wynton Marsalis could disagree with me.  He gets to play.  I don't.  Jazz is dead in America, because we no longer as a nation deserve it.  The ideals in jazz music, the honesty, the love, and the humanity no longer are the prevalent sentiments in America.  If you did assemble all of that jazz and resurrect it for a moment, when you stopped listening and faced reality in America, you would be bludgeoned.  I know this, because it happens to me still, today.  The first time it happened, the reality that jazz was dead, was when I had become abandoned as a jazz educator.  Academia is the only environment that is nurturing enough for certain things to survive.  Jazz is one.  I would guess that if and when I was hired to play a southern wedding, we would play the same beach tunes we did in the 1980's.  This is not progress.  Jazz represented the American Dream, and the American Dream is dead.    It angers me somewhat I bought into this ruse.  I was a a friends home, a bonafide jazz scholar in Columbia, SC, and we had spent the afternoon smoking cannabus, drinking brandy, and enjoy pre-recorded jazz music.  We were listening to "sides."  It is a kind of joy that no longer do I experience.  The feeling that is contained in jazz music is like bliss.  As you can imagine you must be careful with bliss.  Bliss does not do well in America.  We have become a nation of angry, malcontent, psychologically-disturbed serfs.  No one in Washington or corporate America is looking out for us.  Jazz is dated, because it allows the existence of bliss in American society.  We know that this is not possible.  We are a nation of angry, malcontent, psychologically-disturbed serfs.  Serfs don't listen to jazz.  They listen to the Allman Brothers.  I walked out of my friends home happy and content, and was bludgeoned by 102 degree summer heat.  I realized immediately that the only other place I had to go was my own desolate, boring, empty apartment.  It was not a jazz club.  It was not a home with a yard.  It was shit.  Jazz was dead, and it took me quite a few years to realize this.  There were no more concerts.  There was no more studio work.  There was no pay check.  Summer, 102 degree heat, Columbia, South Carolina.  When I moved to Columbus, I tried to take my southern jazz sensibilities with me.  They wholeheartedly were rejected.  The folks in Cowtown were a more die hard group.  There was no riding down the Sunset Strip with the top down and your hand in your girlfriend's crotch.  Instead there was Jimi Hendrix.  Instead of New Orleans jazz, there was Chicago jazz.  I changed.  I changed myself, and it was the best thing I ever did.  I don't play much jazz piano anymore.  I don't play any jazz trumpet, although I am good at both.  Instead I took a job with Carnival Cruise Lines playing in their "orchestras."  When Carnival downsized their music program, I moved to Royal Caribbean.  Never was it as fun as playing in a Carnival band, but the pay was better.  The beauty of a cruise line is they are not the American South.  They don't fancy beach music, plantation homes, and tradition.  They embrace over seventy different nationalities of employees, and they seek to provide mass happiness.  While bliss no longer is possible in America, it is more reasonable on a transient ship floating around in the world's oceans.  I would compose piano music in a music locker below the ship's crew bar.  Off duty crew members would be partying like crazy, and I would be composing meaningful, progressive, expressive music.  The vibe translated.  It was happy.  It was an opportunity.  It was bliss.