Klarinet Archive - Posting 000390.txt from 2003/03

From: b1rite@-----. Rite)
Subj: Re: [kl] Jazz
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 02:19:47 -0500

Tony Wakefield's post that he plays jazz on piano, but not on clarinet,
was the trigger --- albeit indirectly --- for my jazz question.

Our town has a jazz society that presents a season of 'big name' jazz
performers in a 600-seat theater, and it also presents a once-a-month
session for local jazz performers & groups in a 50-seat bistro setting.
The audience for both of these is almost exclusively 40 yrs and older.

For example, at the Mark O'Connor concert, I happened to arrive early
and I made a special effort to survey the audience. O'Connor has a
'hip' style that (I thought) should appeal to teens and young adults.
But out of approximately 600 people, I spotted one 10 year old and one
20-something year old, and everyone one else that I could see was in
their 40's to 70's. That's less than 1% in their 20's or younger!
I've never understood this. As the lady sitting next to me said when
she saw me studying the audience so intently, "The audience is a sea of
gray hair, isn't it?" I nodded in agreement and she said, "Well, it's
jazz" as though this explained the uneven distribution.

So I've wondered for a long time (several years) how to account for
this? I've thought about ticket prices (Dave Brubeck was $60 or so),
but my daughter and many hundreds of other teen and pre-teen parents
blew that much when a truly mediocre boy band came to our town. I've
thought about whether kids think of a bistro as a proper venue for
'their music', but that doesn't make sense to me either. I've thought
about the music classes that our schools offer, but we have a well-known
(locally) jazz teacher who has several instrumental jazz groups and a
jazz choir that wins awards and tours Europe during the summers.

The long and short of it is that when Tony mentioned how his musical
life is divided by the instrument that he happens to be playing, it made
me wonder if jazz is that much separated from other forms of music that
unusual population 'quirks' (to quote Tony) do in fact completely
determine the jazz audience. I'm relieved to learn that, in this
Internet audience at least, many young people choose to attend jazz
performances. My town must have a 'quirk' similar to Tony's that does
not apply globally --- big name jazz musicians **do** play clarinet
<heh!>.

....anyway, Thanks for the replies, and thanks to Tony for the
interesting comment.

Cheers,
Bill

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