Jazz in Public Places

As a blossoming musicologist specializing in American music, especially jazz, I am particularly sensitive to public performances of jazz. One thing that years of grad seminars have taught me is that the messages in our environment are almost always scripted. As I sit in a popular coffee and pastry establishment drinking coffee and listening to the jazz coming through the speakers above and behind me, I am thinking about the choices being made in the programming.

I notice something consistent: every track is a small group, anything from a trio to a quintet; it is all firmly in the bebop and hard bop mold, but usually toned down tracks; players on these tracks rarely exhibit the rasping tone that pushed jazz into an expression of culture and protest as it did in the 60's. The tempi do not stray far from a comfortable finger snap on the half note. It is the kind of jazz that is not threatening and allows casual listeners to identify "jazz in the background" but draws no more attention to itself than provide a patina of cool.

In my opinion, the appearance of jazz in this context is a kind of postmodernist repurposing of culture. In other words, jazz doesn't signify the meanings invested in the music by its creators; rather, the music provides an atmosphere, one that perhaps conjures romantic beat-inspired fantasies of hanging out in dark dens where jazz was once actually played.

This is further problematized by the realization that the appearance of jazz in coffee shops and bars had more to do with an economy of jazz in which players found themselves providing the soundtrack to the public's Friday night out, the only viable alternative when real concert venues were few and far between. Jazz's early repugnance to "respectable" classes arose from the economic exigency of employment. Early twentieth century bordellos, juke joints and roadhouses paid. Unfortunately, the associated stigma of those modes of employement kept musicians in low paying club scenes for years, more for the purpose of selling cocktails than expressing the artistic inclination of its musicians. And here, today, through recording, they sell not cocktails but coffee and paninis.