The Internet and the Death of Jazz: Race, Improvisation, and the Crisis of Community

Abstract

In his landmark 1994 study Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Paul Berliner describes American jazz as a community cutting across “boundaries defined by age, class, vocation, and ethnicity.” This includes the core of the community, those players focused on playing only jazz professionally, as well as more peripheral groups, like professional musicians who play not only jazz but also other genres professionally, semi-professional players with day jobs (“weekend warriors”), and jazz fans. “It is their abiding love for the music that binds this diverse population together” (Berliner, 1994, p. 36). Twenty years later, the jazz community can no longer be described in such unified terms. Many contemporary musicians and fans are unified around the idea that jazz-the-artform is dead. Perhaps not dead and buried, but at least stuffed in the taxidermic sense, museified in a sort of jazz diorama. No example illustrates this better than that of the International Thelonious Monk Competition, held every year for a different instrument. A running joke in the scene is that if Thelonious Monk were alive today, he would stand no chance of winning the Monk piano competition, because the music, which was once black, avant-garde music like Monk’s, has become demographically white, aesthetically white-washed, more subject than ever to commercial pressures, and controlled by conservatories.