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Rock vs. Jazz

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By Gary Kamiya for Salon.com

I rarely pay much attention to the Grammys. But this year I noticed that something unusual happened: The album of the year award went to a jazz album, only the second time this has happened in 50 years (if you don't count Frank Sinatra). The legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock won for his album “River," a tribute to the equally legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (who has also never won the top award). As the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff pointed out, the choice could be seen as “a celebration of the academy's more high-minded pop impulses," a kind of makeup call to atone for all those Celine Dions and Whitney Houstons. But the Grammy for Hancock's fine album doesn't change the painful reality that it sold only 55,000 copies, or that jazz sales make up only 3 percent of all music bought in the United States.

Choosing a career as a jazz musician is a little like choosing a career as a painter, poet or dancer -- you'd better get ready to wipe off table four. My cousin and best friend is an instructive example. He's a top-notch jazz and salsa pianist in the Bay Area. He's been playing music much longer than I've been writing, and I can't help but compare our respective careers. I know it's apples and oranges, but there is no doubt in my mind that he's at least as good at what he does as I am at what I do, and probably much better. Certainly if artistic achievement is measured by discipline, he's exponentially better. I didn't start learning Latin and Greek at age 6 (the equivalent of studying classical piano for ten years, as he did), and then take up calculus for a couple more years (the equivalent of learning the jazz vocabulary, with its harmonic complexities and technical challenges) and then have to master organic chemistry (not really a good equivalent of learning the salsa clave, but there isn't one -- suffice it to say that it's really, really hard). He plays with great musicians, occasionally heads his own group at big-name clubs, writes great tunes, is widely respected on the scene -- and has been working at the post office for 25 years. Like 99 percent of jazz musicians, he simply can't make a living at what he does.

It's bizarre, going to some of his gigs. The band is smoking, playing what you just know is the hottest, most advanced, interesting, intense music being performed anywhere in the city that night, and there will be 20 people in the audience. And there's no reason to believe this will ever change. Yes, there are some signs of life -- a sleek new San Francisco version of the longtime Oakland jazz club Yoshi's just opened in the city's revitalized historic Fillmore Jazz District, featuring top artists like Chick Corea, Roy Haynes, Mike Stern, Cedar Walton and Pat Metheny, and it has been drawing good audiences. But when you drop below the big-club, big-name level, times are hard. Most local jazz musicians I know bitch that it's harder than ever to get gigs.

I don't want to write yet another jeremiad about America's cultural illiteracy. They're boring and they don't do any good. For non-jazz fans, being told you should listen to jazz is the equivalent of the bourgeois philistine of yesteryear being dragged to the opera by his “cultured" wife -- it ain't going to make you love the music. Besides, jazz in all its magnificent variety is going to survive. It'll never be as popular as pop music, true, but while that may not be good for my cousin's bank account, it's not the end of the world.

What interests me is the relationship between jazz and the music that helped push it permanently to the margins -- rock. And the strengths and weaknesses, virtues and blind spots, of each genre.

The first album I ever bought was “Meet the Beatles." My first experience of the mysteries of the opposite sex, at age 16, was accompanied by Miles Davis' “All Blues," which happened to come on KJAZ that long-vanished Berkeley night. I sometimes wonder if that bittersweet, half-buried memory is the reason that Miles has been the soundtrack for most of my adult life.

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