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What's With This Uncool Surge in Jazz Bashing?

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How did jazz lose its position as America’s homegrown musical treasure to lately become a symbol of pretentiousness and 'eat-your-broccoli art'?

Jazz doesn’t get much coverage in the mainstream media, and hasn’t for many years. But something strange has happened during the last four months. Over a period of just a few weeks, a host of high profile periodicals have published smug, scornful dismissals of the music. Is this just coincidence, or has something changed in the cultural dialogue?

How did jazz go from America’s musical treasure to whipping boy? Let’s go back to the last day in July, when The New Yorker set the tone with the publication of an interview with Sonny Rollins. Here the sax legend offered observations “in his own words” on his life and times. But, as the jazz community soon learned, this wasn’t really an interview with Rollins, now 84 years old, and the comments attributed to him weren’t his own words, but a satire concocted by a writer who had learned his craft at The Onion.

The article itself wasn’t very funny. (Here’s a taste: “The saxophone sounds horrible. Like a scared pig ... jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with.”) But its premise—that jazz artists take themselves far too seriously—would get repeated again and again in subsequent days. Rollins himself was perturbed enough by the phony interview to make a live rebuttal that streamed on the web and got covered in the press. But that was too little, too late: the new meme was already in play.

Just nine days later, the Washington Post ran a caustic article that began with three memorable sentences: “Jazz is boring. Jazz is overrated. Jazz is washed up.” This article might also have been satire, or perhaps it represented the author’s actual opinion—in either case, it was a clumsy affair. Yet the eerie echoing of the earlier faux interview in another major media outlet was unsettling for jazz lovers. After years of complaining that their favorite music got too little attention from journalists, they now began to long for those days of blissful obscurity.

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