The art of our era aims for the middle ground, innovation is rare, true creativity superseded by the need for profit. 

Let’s take tenor players, for example.  Fifty years ago, you could hear a tenor player and immediately tell if he was from Texas or Chicago or Philly.  Each city had something that made it unique.  Today, everyone sounds remarkably alike, dipping into that same pool.  That’s because we live in a mall culture.  Everyone gets the same information now.  The power of the mass media cannot be underestimated.

And who controls the mass media? Large, faceless corporations with only one thing in mind, PROFITS.  As their tentacles entangle every pore of our being, the more they control, the more sanitized our culture becomes. 

But, intones our Greek chorus, in this case, Matt Pierson of Warner Bros, it’s the nature of the corporation to make money, they are an entity designed strictly for only one purpose.  And of course there’s nothing illegal about that, it’s the American way.  Sometimes, in fact, our friend Matt might argue, and justifiably so, something of lasting value comes from the big boys.

Yet more often than not, in their quest for profits, they find it’s a lot easier to look back, to re-release a classic or create a soon-to-be-forgotten tribute to a past master.  This site, Bird Lives, focuses on jazz but I can’t single out my favorite music as being the only contemporary creation lacking in excitement. I haven’t seen a new movie or play or painting that has moved me like "Network" or "Death of a Salesman" or "Guernica" in a long time.  And aside from George Carlin, I haven’t heard anyone speak the truth on television. 

Accordingly, we entertain ourselves with a different sort of amusement.  Since contemporary culture produces very little of lasting value, our fascination now focuses on the business of our land, the all-powerful corporations and their gatekeepers. 

Which brings me, in a rather convoluted way, to the Tap Dancing Gorilla of Jazz, or, what is now called, the Verve Group.

The talk of the jazz world is still "the merger" and how it will effect us.  Supposedly, this new entity created from the merger of Verve and GRP/Impulse will control 25% of the jazz recording marketplace. 

First of all, some corrections to our last diatribe on the subject, the 500 Lb. Gorilla, are in order.  An inside source tells us that we were right on about the departure of two new artists signed to Impulse, Omar Avitar and Jason Linder, whose recently completed CDs will never be released by the label.  But, we were wrong about guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. He stays.

When the merger went down, there was major corporate pressure for the labels involved to trim, trim, trim.  Therefore, certain artists were dropped from the roster.  New artists in particular, were closely scrutinized.  It became, what some call, an artist development issue.  The men at the top, Tommy LiPuma and Ron Goldstein, had to choose which artists seemed mostly likely to go the distance.  Rosenwinkel best fit that profile, so he stays.  

We have been assured that LiPuma will do everything he can to find another home for the recordings of Avitar and Linder.  But at $50,000 a pop, it seems unlikely that another label will purchase their masters.

We were also wrong about Eric Reed and Donald Harrison.  Reed has a new release forthcoming, and now that he’s signed with Mary Ann Topper, the manager who helped propel Joshua Redman to stardom, he should be around for a while.  Donald Harrison, however, is still on shaky ground.  Gone from the roster are Geri Allen, Chris Botti and now, guitarist Mark Whitfield. 

But the real question is this:  will this 500 Lb. Gorilla be able to tap dance?  Now that roster is trimmed and the new management in place, how will they use their newfound power?  What type of recordings will they release and how will they promote them?

Will the music be sanitized, to reach the masses, or will we see a return to the golden era, when Norman Granz at Verve, and Bob Thiele at Impulse, left us music guaranteed to survive the ages?

Stay tuned.