Jazz - from Benny Goodman's swing to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew to acid jazz - has consistently remained at the musical and cultural vanguard. But at the "Jazz 2001: The Convergence of Jazz and Technology" conference at New York's famous club The Knitting Factory on Monday, jazz musicians and producers found themselves surprised to learn that, after years at the forefront, they just might need to get hip.
The rise of online distribution channels, software composition advances, and marketing opportunities are forcing music labels and musicians to think twice about what seemed to be the enemy of authentic music: the computer. For the most part, the conference, sponsored by JazzTimes magazine and music resource N2K Entertainment, brought to light the frustrations and fears of label executives from Blue Note Records, RCA Records, and Polygram. The musicians, however, seemed only thrilled at the prospects for experimentation - and promotion - online.
Elder saxophonist Billy Harper, who says he "never wanted to deal with electric things at all," recalled a recent concert in Poland where he was besieged by crowds begging for more - online. "They were asking me, 'Are you on the Net?'" Harper recounted. Now, with the launch of his own homepage at Jazz Corner, Harper has been transformed into a ecstatic booster, imagining a world of jazz franchising at the fever pitch of baseball, with jazz playing cards, caps, and sax reeds. As he describes it, the Web "is the shape of things to come."
Conference creator Bret Primack of Jazz Central Station said the temperament of jazz musicians prepares them for experimenting with technology. "Jazz musicians have always been trying to push music forward" and their curiosity is an outgrowth of their musical flexibility, says Primack.
Some musicians bit early into the promise of new technologies, specifically as a compositional tool. Brooklyn saxophonist Greg Osby sent new songs to other players by modem as early as 1987, and even started a composer's newsgroup to exchange eight-bar musical phrases with players in Japan and Italy. Osby, who admits he's a mediocre keyboard player, says the powerful MIDI sampling software has given musicians a "much wider palette." The Web became a kind of addiction for Osby, who has sworn off the Net for the time being. "I was on too long," he says ruefully. "I was doing it so much I wasn't composing."
Jazz's shrinking share in the traditional markets has also driven labels to reconsider their approach to the Web. "In retail during the '80s, jazz occupied 6 to 8 percent of the entire retail market," N2K CEO Larry Cohen said in the keynote speech. "But by the '90s, that figure dropped in half" as a result of mounting "real estate" pressures for retailers to stock CDs that sell quickly.
The Web, on the other hand, has offered infinite virtual shelves for product and flattened out those figures said Cohen. At Music Boulevard, N2K's retail music site, 18 percent of the site's total sales are jazz albums.
Currently, the music industry is largely bound by constrictive "screening" organizations, says Jim McDermott, VP of new technology for Polygram Records. "The industry has to go through all these filters - radio stations that won't play the album until it's on sale, and retailers that won't sell the album until the radio is playing it," he says.
The labels, however, continue to drag their heels until technological advances make true high-quality delivery online possible. Those advances may be imminent, said Chris Bell from N2K. "We're on the verge of throwing away skunkworks technology ... like RealAudio," said Bell. "We are on the verge of new systems which distribute music" that would satisfy both musicians and fans. The company hopes that its own e_mod system, a high-precision application designed specifically for CD-quality delivery online, can become an industry standard.
While the American music industry still watches the developments skeptically, international consumers are flocking to music retail sites, mostly for the savings. Primack notes that 40 percent of the sales at Music Boulevard are international, and the site itself is published in Japanese. Nurturing this market is a form of education and commerce, says Cohen, helping to "expand the jazz market internationally into countries [where] they may have two jazz titles in the store."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
