Jazz in the new millennium is in a very different world to the idealized television retrospective Jazz directed by the American filmmaker Ken Burns a few years ago. The reason is simple. It’s competing for the leisure dollar in a highly competitive marketplace that offers a bewildering array of consumer choices unheard of in jazz’s Golden Years – the huge popularity of ring tones and multitask cell phones; DVDs; video games; the internet and cable television where the need to fill hundreds of digital channels underlines the truth of the Bruce Springsteen song, “57 Channels (and Nothing On).”
Jazz’s voice is struggling to be heard. So what’s new? Hasn’t it always jostled with popular culture for the public’s attention throughout its history? Of course it has, but never before has it had to compete in a world where popular culture is being marketed and promoted with such ruthless efficiency. You only have to look at the United States, the world’s largest single market for goods, services, technology, capital and labour for evidence of a real squeeze on jazz.
Business competition is more intense in the USA than anywhere else on the globe. Companies and corporations look for higher returns over shorter periods than their competitors and look to increase shareholder value by spending money to shore up market share or by taking over other companies to achieve market leadership. A tidal wave of mergers since 1994 saw a cool $5 trillion change hands.
As the 21st century dawned, the American entertainment industry had consolidated into a handful of players all vying for market monopoly – Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, AT&T, Viacom and Sony/BMG – while a once chaotic music industry, with an ever changing array of exciting music labels like Atlantic, Chess, Motown, Verve and Blue Note that were once as anarchic as the music itself has shrunk to just four major players – EMI, Time-Warner, Universal and Sony/BMG.
“The real impact of these vertical integration mergers,” says Benjamin R. Barber in his essay “The Making of McWorld” in the New Perspective Monthly, “is going to be the gradual homogenisation of culture on a planetary scale and the choking off of difference. This will not come as a result of overt censorship, tyranny or even monopolistic intent of a small group of media owners, but rather as a consequence of market forces that tend to give popular majoritarian culture the edge. Imitation and competition for that majoritarian market will squeeze out anything innovative and different.”
This trend is already well advanced, particularly in the United States, whose culture is overwhelmingly popular culture and where majority taste is squeezing out jazz, whose very essence is realised in innovation and difference. This struggle between economic power and cultural power has prompted the American cultural critic Frederic Jameson to write, “We are witnessing the collapse of the distinction between…culture itself and economic activity.” Majority taste actually promotes a conformist outlook, indeed, the United States, despite its pretensions to individualism and freedom is one of the most conformist countries in the world. “The neat narrative formulas in which most entertainment is packaged,” says Neal Gabler in his book Life: The Movie, “deny personal taste or sensitivity or intelligence – anything that might pry the individual away from the undifferentiated lump.”
Gabler claims America is the “Republic of Entertainment” which, he says, is “the prime focus of American life” with the major corporations seeking to colonise the imagination of consumers through the cult of celebrity. Celebrities are both an extension of the American entertainment industry and an entertainment in themselves. There may be a bloody war being unsuccessfully mounted by thousands of American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is Madonna’s proposed adoption of a child from Malawi that’s in the news.
Celebrities dominate the headlines because the major corporations that control the U.S. media – General Electric (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, Bravo and 13 TV stations), Time Warner (AOL, CNN, Warner Bros, Time and 130 magazines), Disney (ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, plus 10 TV and 29 radio stations), News Corporation (FOX, HarperCollins, New York Post, DirecTV and 34 TV stations), Viacom (CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster and 185 radio stations) and Sony/Bertelsmann (Random House and its more than 100 imprints plus Gruner + Jahr and its 80 magazines) – recognise their importance in promoting the aspirational nature of consumerism and the ideology of popular culture. American film and television productions dominate the globe, so almost all global celebrities are American (or hopefuls who have relocated in America and have realised the American Dream). They play out their lives to a world-wide following and are among globalization’s most useful props projecting a specific set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language and the implicit acknowledgement that America is best.
It’s all a long, long way from the world of the jazz musician, who has seen popular culture become an established aspect of the modern personality that is seemingly beyond criticism. The challenge, then, is to somehow resist the onslaught of free markets since the relentless pursuit of profit is squeezing art and culture out of the music marketplace and filling the cultural spaces with pop. It means the future of jazz in America has to be seen in the context of a music marketplace dominated by today’s profit maximizing companies and corporations.
In his book The End of History and the Last Man, the neo-conservative academic Francis Fukuyama suggested there are only three elements that are resistant to what he saw as the inevitability of American cultural hegemony: nationalism, fundamentalism and culture. Of these he suggests, culture, in the form of resistance to American values and consumerism, provides “the biggest threat” to the Americanization of the world. However, there are those outside America who resist the notion that market forces should be the sole determinant of cultural patterns.
All cultures see themselves as unique and worth preserving and governments outside America have seen subsidy of the arts as one way of resisting the homogenizing effects of globalization (Americanization). In both Europe and Australia the concept of a public realm and the underwriting of welfare, science, transport, health, broadcasting, art and culture by governmental subsidy has helped preserve individuality and diversity. Here there is a history of subsidizing the arts, of which jazz is a beneficiary. As the German philosopher Hannah Arendt argues in her book The Human Condition, a public realm allows the full flowering of our human sensibilities. It is in stark contrast to the jazz scene in the USA, where Steen Meier, Chairman of the Nordic Music Council and Copenhagen’s famous JazzHouse, observes, “If we take a look at jazz in the USA now it exists only as a historical niche culture. Musicians can hardly make a living in a society which offers no subsidies in this musical genre.”
Meier’s assertion is borne out by the New York Times which has noted that American jazz musicians are forced to generate up to 80% of their income stream outside their home country. “Europe has Replaced America as the Land of Opportunity for Jazz Music and Jazz Musicians,” proclaimed the industry journal Music & Media. In the USA, the rise of the right’s anti-Liberal agenda argues that the boundaries between high art and low art must be dismantled and the arts be placed on a business footing where measurement of results provides the ground for investment, and if the arts cannot repay public subsidy or demonstrate immediate social relevance, then there are no grounds for investment.
This materialistic approach to the arts has reduced jazz’s value there to something that can be bought and sold in the music marketplace, inevitably leading to the commodification of a complex art form. In his influential essay “A Theory of Mass Culture” the American cultural theorist Dwight Macdonald pointed out that America was under threat from Gresham’s Law of culture: that the bad will drive out the good and the result will be not just a homogeneous culture but a “homogenized culture…that threatens to engulf everything.”
In contrast, in most European countries, jazz has long been absorbed into the cultural norms, symbolic meanings and contextual rules (collectively referred to as cultural capital) of its nation states who acknowledge that jazz contributes to their cultural diversity and along with other performing arts – classical, opera, dance. Governmental subsidy, regional subsidy, and lottery money have all allowed cultural activity to flourish in Europe and is why it is such an attractive market for American jazz musicians. “I think funding and support by the government for the arts is actually one of government’s responsibilities,” says tenor saxophonist Yuri Honing, one of the Holland’s leading young jazz musicians. “If you look at history, the church was originally the main financier of most of the arts and later on royalty took on that role as the most important promoter of art. So it is quite logical that as church and royalty no longer support the arts, the government is responsible.”
Yet the globalization of mass produced American culture continues to have the potential to undermine long established local cultures and identity itself. As Tessa Jowell, Minister of Culture in Tony Blair’s government in 2005, cautioned, “Governments of the left have a duty to make available the widest range of cultural activity. We must not let the market alone decide. Without [a] balance we face the homogenization of culture.”
France was long ago alert to these problems, introducing the “cultural exception” (l’exception culturelle) to protect its cultural industries during the Uruguay Round of international trade negotiations in the early 1990s. Their government had no intention of scrapping protectionist measures and allowing, for example, Hollywood films to swamp its market or give up providing film subsidies that made it the largest film producer in Europe. Claudie Ossard, producer of the Oscar-nominated Amélie, said it would be “suicidal” for France not to protect its cinema and other cultural products. None of his films, such as the acclaimed Delicatessen or Arizona Dream, could have been made without governmental subsidy, for example. Australia and South Korea have also moved to protect their film industries while in Canada, the CanCon regulations (Canadian Content) require television and radio stations to play a given amount of domestic programming and limits the number of foreign television channels. In China, the government is trying to preserve Chinese culture through control of the airwaves.
Measures such as these in tandem with government funding have largely proved successful in protecting the unique character and diversity of individual nation state’s cultures. The irony here is that if jazz was properly funded in the USA it could play a vital role, as it does in Europe and Australia, in bridging the widening gap between art and society through its unique appeal as a lowbrow art form that attracts highbrow acclaim.
Yet while the investment in the arts remains small in comparison with other areas of governance the returns are large. In jazz, this can be demonstrated by the diversity of approaches by “local” musicians outside the United States, where its greatest success has been in the creation of original music that is both part of a universal language called jazz and a singular expression of cultural and national identity.
Yet governmental spending on the arts is not a given, particularly in the face of what France has called the “Anglo Saxon” economic system advocated by the USA and adopted by economies such as the United Kingdom and Australia. Its basic tenants are a tendency towards lower levels of taxes and regulation to favour free market economics that inevitably result in a smaller role for the state in crucial areas such as health, transport, public utilities (electricity, water, gas) which are handed to private contractors, and a reduction of state subsidies for art and culture. It is in contrast to the “Continental” economic model advocated by countries in mainland Europe such as France, Germany and Italy, who reason the state should play a greater role in the public realm through the provision of services and subsidies, in which the arts and culture is a major beneficiary. Inevitably this produces a higher tax regime that is an anathema to the free market economics where “free markets” is simply a euphemism for free mobility of American capital, free access to markets by American corporations and free movement of goods “from the west to the rest.”
This slide towards free market economics by the United Kingdom and Australia is advanced through the superficially enticing electioneering slogan of “lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government.” But it comes with a price tag; a transference from public funding which is accountable and transparent to the private sector which is unaccountable and opaque. As John Tusa has argued in his book Art Matters, “The arts stand naked without a defence in a world where what cannot be measured is not valued.” Thus we must be ever vigilant in ensuring funding for the arts is maintained in the face of ever more powerful demands from multinational corporations whose promotion of their culture products on a global scale is creating a monoculture that far from encouraging diversity, is a triumph in promoting conformity.
Stuart Nicholson’s latest book, Is Jazz Dead (Or Has It Moved To A New Address)? is published by Routledge.