# Jazz musicians see signs of hope … Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/01/22/jazz-musicians-see-signs-of-hope-video-photos/
- Published: 2021-01-22T15:44:38+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Born in the 1960s in the city that birthed Motown, Regina Carter can’t remember
a time when music was absent from her life. But Carter, a three-time Grammy-nominated
violinist, has a specific recollection of the moment she fell in love with jazz.**

“Ninth-grade orchestra at Cass Tech in Detroit and Carla Cook [a Grammy-nominated
jazz vocalist] was always talking about Eddie Jefferson and Sarah Vaughan and all
these artists I’d never heard of,” Carter said. “Then she bought me my first jazz
record with three violinists — Noel Pointer, Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli—
and that album just turned my world around.”

Ephraim Dorsey was born four decades later in Philadelphia, the city that birthed
the legendary Billie Holiday. The 17-year-old saxophonist can remember the moment
he, too, fell in love with jazz.

“I went to a sax camp led by Carl Grubbs, who had studied with John Coltrane,” said
Dorsey, a senior at the Baltimore School for the Arts. “That moment, hearing Carl
Grubbs play, was when I decided I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”

In a few weeks Nielsen Music will release its annual Year End Music Report for 2020,
which looks at data and trends in the industry. And if this year is anything like
2019 (and the year before that), the data on sales for various genres of music will
show that epiphanies like those that came to Dorsey and Carter aren’t widely shared.
Jazz sales ranked slightly above classical music, and slightly behind children’s
music. Jazz accounts for just 1.1% of total sales, with a quarter of its sales coming
from physical album sales. Compare that with R&B/hip-hop, which generates almost
28% of total sales and derives only 4% of its sales from physical albums (vs. 91%
from streaming).

![](https://i0.wp.com/theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Regina-Carter.
jpg?resize=640%2C427&ssl=1)

Regina Carter’s Southern Comfort performs during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage
Festival 2019 50th Anniversary at Fair Grounds Race Course on May 2, 2019, in New
Orleans.

That’s a far cry from where the genre was positioned 100 years ago when jazz, which
originated in New Orleans and was rooted in African culture, was considered the 
world’s most popular style of music. It was popular dance music through the big-
band era and musicians such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins were
the definition of cool in the ’50s.

Pay no attention to them, says Robert Shahid, a drummer and on-air talent at the
jazz station WEAA-FM in Baltimore. He laughs when asked about the demise of the 
music he fell in love with as a young boy while seeing a live performance by the
Count Basie Orchestra at the Earle Theatre in Philadelphia.

“Hearing what all those horns sounded like live — I had heard them on records — 
was just powerful,” Shahid said. “The death of jazz? You don’t hear it anymore on
mainstream radio. But jazz is alive and well.”

---

Jazz is alive and well enough to be a main story line in Pixar’s new animated movie,
_Soul_, which will be released on Christmas Day and stars Jamie Foxx in the role
of a jazz music teacher. Like _La La Land_ in 2016, it has the potential to introduce
the music to new audiences. But is jazz still cool?

But, as evident from some of the lines of the post, the title is not what you think:

_Jazz was a limited title to begin with._

_Jazz is a label that was forced upon the musicians._

_Jazz separated itself from American popular music._

_Big mistake._

_The music never recovered._

_Jazz is only cool if you don’t actually play it for a living._

_A glaring example of what’s wrong with Jazz is how people fight over it._

_People are too afraid to let go of a name that is killing the spirit of the music._

Payton, reached by phone at his home in New Orleans, said he’s caught nearly a decade
of heat from fellow musicians who saw the headline of the blog post, but never actually
dove into the message in his words.

![](https://i0.wp.com/theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Nicholas-Payton.
jpg?resize=640%2C427&ssl=1)

Trumpet player Nicholas Payton performs at the Radcliffe Institute’s Radical Commitments:
The Life and Legacy of Angela Davis on Oct. 28, 2019, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“My problem is not with the music but the label, jazz, which is derogatory and was
forced on musicians,” said Payton, pointing out that many of the synonyms for the
word (including baloney, crapola, bilge) are negative. “The music has been mislabeled
and packaged with a name that many artists had a problem with, and a name that didn’t
have anything to do with the Black community. The music needs to be properly acknowledged.”

Lewis “Flip” Barnes, a trumpet player from New York who was introduced to jazz via
the _Porgy and Bess_ studio album recorded by Miles Davis, agrees about the lack
of acknowledgement.

“People don’t talk about Duke Ellington as the great composer that he was the way
they talk about George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein,” Barnes said. “We, as Black
people, just don’t get the respect for our contributions to this music.”

Payton has a term that he believes fits the bill: Black American Music, and he uses
the hashtag #BAM to push his projects. “The intent of the Black American Music movement
is to give the proper credit to this music.”

There are many artists who disagreed with Payton’s approach including Branford Marsalis,
who called Payton’s post “a non-discussion” in a 2012 _Jazz Times_ interview. “The
idea that you’re going to change the name and people are going to like it is absurd,”
Marsalis told _Jazz Times_. “Nicholas Payton can further his argument just by playing
his horn.”

If jazz was truly on its deathbed in recent years, the pandemic could have buried
it for good. Yet while the global crisis has been devastating to the entire entertainment
industry, the genre continues to maintain a strong pulse.

It’s taken some ingenuity.

Arturo O’Farrill, for instance, launched a weekly Virtual Birdland Concert Series
as he led the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, a labor-intensive effort that involved 
18 musicians filming and recording their individual parts before turning their work
over to a sound engineer and video editor who worked 40-hour weeks to put on a concert.

**“**We had musicians giving of themselves when they themselves were hurting, all
in order to help their colleagues,” O’Farrill said. “We’ve had episodes with musicians
in five different countries participating — a percussionist in Kuwait, a singer 
in Paris, a trumpet player in London, and a guitar player in Abu Dhabi, and musicians
here — all performing one piece at the same time in a way that you couldn’t do except
by amassing a huge debt in airplane tickets.

“Initially we didn’t think this would live in the confines of a computer,” O’Farrill
said. “But it has reached people who could never afford in a thousand years to come
to New York to the real Birdland. This has truly been one of the very best things
I’ve ever experienced.”

![](https://i0.wp.com/theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Arturo-OFarrill.
jpg?resize=640%2C390&ssl=1)

Jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill performs in concert at Symphony Space in New York
on Jan. 19, 2017.

For Lakecia Benjamin, a saxophonist and bandleader from New York, the year began
promisingly with plans for a new CD, _Pursuance: The Coltranes,_ and a worldwide
tour to promote the project. She expected the tour to recoup the money spent to 
book studio time and for the featured artists who appeared on the project. But the
CD dropped on March 25 — just as the pandemic began to force closings across the
United States.

Benjamin’s gig at Carnegie Hall, a first as a bandleader: gone. Shows scheduled 
in 10,000-seat venues in Europe, including a festival in Montreux, Switzerland: 
eliminated. “I was reaching the place in my career where I was just starting to 
make a real impact,” Benjamin said. “I was playing at Carnegie Hall with my own 
group, that’s a place I hadn’t played since I was in a middle school all-star band.
It felt I was about to bump up to that next status.”

Benjamin, like O’Farrill, pursued her music virtually. She hosted a question-and-
answer series on Instagram featuring music greats such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, Gary
Bartz and Georgia Anne Muldrow. And her CD dropping at a time when many releases
were being delayed provided her project heavy exposure. In late November, Benjamin
received a notification from Spotify that her CD had reached the milestone of 1 
million streams in 92 countries.

“This has made me think of an album differently,” Benjamin said. “I look at it now
as a business card to introduce me to a new audience.”

And that new audience has been eager to reach out through social media to express
appreciation to the artists they’ve discovered in 2020.

“People have told me they’d never heard of me before, and they’re enjoying the music,”
said Carter, the violinist who is nominated for a Grammy for best improvised jazz
solo. “It’s difficult to do a concert virtually, because we can’t feel them, and
they can’t feel us. But performing has been food for the soul for us, and the audience
that have discovered us. When we perform, we’re like little kids at Christmas, and
we don’t want to stop.”

![](https://i0.wp.com/theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Brandee-Younger.
jpg?resize=640%2C446&ssl=1)

Jazz musician Brandee Younger performs onstage with her quartet during a Blue Note
Jazz Festival concert at Central Park SummerStage in New York City on June 15, 2019.

The pandemic forced harpist Brandee Younger to learn skills as a videographer, engineer
and photographer to record the Brunch in the Crib weekly concert series alongside
her partner, bassist Dezron Douglas. Those recorded streams were recently released
as their latest album, _Force Majeure_, the term that hits close to home: It’s a
clause that allows performance contracts to be canceled due to dramatic unforeseen
circumstances.

“That clause has never been enforced, until now,” Younger says of the money from
scheduled gigs that is forever lost. “The album was recorded during a dark period—
the civil rights protests following George Floyd happened right outside our window
here in Harlem — and serves as a form of therapy for us.”

And, for Younger and other artists, the pandemic has served as a lesson.

“The approach we have is a new way of life,” Younger said. “The playing field, as
a result of the pandemic and the closures, is equal and the audience can choose 
who they want to listen to for real, for real.”

“I looked across the stage and saw these beautiful characters that were contemporary,
new and doing wonderful things,” O’Farrill said. “Looking at that crazy diverse 
audience reminded me of my philosophy when I’m performing: Perform it so a 6-year-
old will be enchanted by it, a 35-year-old will be analyzing it, and someone in 
their 80s will be comforted by it.”

Benjamin, who grew up in a household where her mother listened to Biggie Smalls 
and her grandmother embraced the music of Jackie Wilson and Michael Jackson, agreed
that the merging of generations and cultures through the music is important.

“Artists like Robert Glasper and Christian Scott are mixing it up a bit where they
honor tradition working with the greats like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, while
also doing collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Jill Scott,” Benjamin said. “A
lot of people think jazz has died. I see it as reaching a new fusion point.”

And that fusion is the lane likely to be taken by Ephraim Dorsey and his younger
sister, Ebban, also a saxophonist, who represent the next generation that will keep
the genre thriving. Both appreciate the legends of jazz, while at the same time 
understanding the musicality of hip-hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole.

“I’ve played at places like Dizzy’s Jazz Club [New York], and the Kennedy Center
and me and my brother often find ourselves the youngest people in the room and that
used to bother me,” said Ebban, 16, a high school junior. “But going to camps and
attending different events geared towards younger people, and you realize there 
are people my age that want to play just as much as I do, even people younger than
me.

“That tells me jazz isn’t fading,” Ebban Dorsey said. “It’s definitely still here
and still alive. It just needs to be acknowledged.”

![Mastercard Jazz 2019 – Day 2](https://i0.wp.com/theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/
2020/12/Lakecia-Benjamin-e1608308527259.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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