Last week’s post on the jazz museum and jazz as the city’s marketing identity prompted some comments that merit response. After I wrote, “Centering the marketing of a city on music that people associate with sitting studiously seems guaranteed to produce unspectacular results,” CB responded:
Festivals are fun but jazz is about sitting down and paying attention?? Come on Alex you know better. While that may be the uninformed public opinion it’s certainly not correct.
True, but where marketing is concerned, what the public thinks counts. When people are making decisions about where to spend their tourist dollars, the associations they have with jazz matter. And as the yearly carping in New Orleans and on message boards that there’s no jazz at Jazz Fest tells us, a lot of people don’t think of trad jazz or brass bands when they think of jazz.
CB continues:
The jazz museum may be an opportunity to entertain and educate the public about what jazz is really about.
Again, true, but is the purpose of marketing a city to educate, or is it to get people here? “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” doesn’t promise anything morally, spiritually or intellectually edifying, but it has worked as a slogan that convinces people to come to Las Vegas and step out of their day-to-day life.
One last thought on this marketing point: I suspect that museums and educational experiences figure more prominently the travel considerations of parents vacationing with children. In a city where so much of its music takes place in clubs late at night, I also wonder if a jazz museum and performance space is really enough to convince families that this is where they want to go anyway.
In another comment, Belyin writes, ” New Orleans’ always finds away to keep it funky, even when it tries to high-minded.”
Rahsaan Roland Kirk referred to jazz as Black Classical Music, which I took to mean the height of African-American musical accomplishment. Today, jazz is often treated as Black Classical Music by those who’d put it in museums and spaces that separate it by the signifiers of class from its roots. As I said in the previous post, jazz and classical music are for many the music mature, intelligent people are supposed to like, though ironically, they’re often the musics that are played as background music in coffee shops.
History shows that New Orleans isn’t that good at formalizing and moving jazz into more rarified, class-separating contexts. It doesn’t speak well for civic leaders, but sooner or later, a lack of unity, a lack of vision, a lack of funding, a lack of vision or some similar impediment rises up to keep leaders from commodifying jazz or roots expressions more than they have.
Or, it’s a resistance from the culture producers. As Belyin’s post suggests, there’s too much vital jazz being made today that doesn’t fit in a Ken Burns narrative, or that doesn’t follow such outmoded notions as the principle that jazz must swing and that it must be on blues changes.
Related to that, a question I’ve been considering since Katrina is what the role of government is in the recovery of an arts community, and if government assistance could be detrimental. After all, semi-popular music – jazz, pop, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, country – has generally been a response to power, and certainly most New Orleans music has been resistance music. Can it maintain that status and danger if the city and state government help support it? I don’t worry about some form of censorship, but I wonder what happens when the power and money dynamics that lead to creativity change.
