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He interviewed some heavy-hitters in the local jazz scene—Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Jason Koransky, editor of Down Beat—who admitted that they don’t actually listen to jazz on the radio, and then interviewed his 17-year-old son and a few of his friends, who said they prefer listening to music on the Internet and their iPods. This, McDonough essentially said, suggested that music programming was no longer useful. I’ll admit that I don’t listen to the radio much either, but I’m not the average listener. Neither is Deutsch or Koransky. We get loads of CDs in the mail and earn a living listening to them. If I didn’t have such access, radio would be the ideal medium to hear new stuff.
Finally, in the story’s idiotic conclusion, McDonough said that jazz and blues (which is also getting the hook) weren’t doing too bad in Chicago. As proof he pointed out that House of Blues has become a nationwide franchise, as if the club (which books jazz almost never and blues only sparingly) were some sort of homegrown operation done good, which it’s not–it didn’t start here and it’s been a chain for more than a decade now. He also cites the presence of jazz at Ravinia and Symphony Center (each puts on maybe six or seven concerts a year) and the programming at the Jazz Institute as further evidence. But these are all venues that, much like WBEZ, focus on national and international artists, largely ignoring the individuals who are key to the local scene’s survival.
