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An essay by British critic Stuart Nicholson caught my eye as I was leafing through the March 2007 issue of the British jazz magazine Jazzwise. It suggests that the days of American jazz musicians riding Europe’s gravy train may be coming to an end. Many American jazz musicians rely on the European circuit to make a living, but with the growing popularity of the European scene, which has forged its own take on jazz over the last couple of decades, Americans are finding fewer gigs, and promoters are beginning to balk at the fees demanded by their booking agents (to cover travel expenses and so forth).
Nicholson has created this trans-Atlantic battle using selective evidence, and his certainty that Europe is winning is bolstered by his deep ignorance of what’s really going on in the US. He prattles on about the negative consequences of Wynton Marsalis’s doctrinaire take on jazz and the homogenizing effects of American jazz education—both fair, if tired points—but he presents nothing else to support the idea that we’re in a tailspin over here, and citing groups like the where-are-they-now jazz-house group St. Germain and the vacuous Swedish trio E.S.T. doesn’t exactly help his case that Europe is on fire. His conclusion is that American jazz is doomed unless the government starts subsidizing it, stat! Since we know that ain’t gonna happen, we’ll just have to cross our fingers. America has managed to support a creative musical engine for a century without subsidies, and though I’d love to see piles of money given over to the arts, I think we’ll continue to manage OK without it.
