To guess where jazz is headed in the new milennium, I think we have to look at what it's become at the end of this one: a glorious goulash of styles and idioms, innovative approaches and reconstructive surgery, all coexisting and occasionally influencing each other. No one idiom fully predominates, and only a fool would try to tack a single descriptive label on this period. So you abstract from that, and take a guess at what we might see in at least the first decade of jazz's second century.

I'd have to count the renewed popularity of '70s fusion jazz as one of the more surprising developments of the '90s; after all, fusion appeared to have died even before Wynton Marsalis arrived to denounce it. Yet here come the Yellowjackets (sounding more like Weather Report every day); here's Medeski, Martin & Wood, and the return of the Headhunters of Herbie Hancock fame, and musicians revisiting (and even re-recording) Miles Davis's electric playgrounds. So I've got to think we'll hear some more of that in the near future.

I'm pretty excited about the current wave of Latin jazz, a term that more than ever needs quotation marks around it - because it has grown so different from what it used to be. This movement centers on players such as pianist Danilo Perez (born in Panama), saxist David Sanchez (Puerto Rico), and trumpeter Claudio Roditi (Brazil). They all have steeped themselves in North American jazz, but they also retain and continue to explore the rhythms and meters of their native lands; and because they understand both worlds so well, they can meld them seamlessly. If music reflects popular concerns and societal trends, as I think it does, the next century's jazz will have a lot to do with the unification of the Western Hemisphere into a giant trade zone with many flavors, rather than a marketplace of competing countries.

I guess my primary prediction stems from the desire of many musicians to re-order the priorities of jazz. Sometimes this involves a new balance between composition and improvisation; between innovation and revivalism; or between vocal and instrumental music. You hear it not only in the new post-freedom music proliferating in lower Manhattan, Chicago, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Berlin (listen to Myra Melford, Dave Douglas, Ken Vandermark, Matthew Shipp, Joe McPhee, the trio Clusone, Uri Caine, Ernest Dawkins's New Horizons Ensemble); you also hear it in the more adventurous mainstream music in those capitals and throughout the rest of the jazz-savvy world. I really enjoy the fact that so many people now are fiddling around with structure, trying to find different ways of complicating the form while incorporating improvisation - sometimes as a structural element itself. This investigation of the fundamental structure of jazz could well emerge, in retrospect, as the defining characteristic of the '90s, and a gateway into the new jazz of the '00s.

But perhaps a bigger question concerns where we'll all get to hear the new jazz, whatever twists it takes. Public radio, which in this country has provided the main outlet for jazz in the last 20 years, is in an all-but-total collapse: thanks to cutbacks in government funding, the public radio stations now must deal with pressures similar to those of their commercial-radio cousins, boosting ratings so they can attract underwriting and a higher number of listener-members. And that means, in virtually every case - from WBGO in New Jersey to WBEZ in Chicago to KLON in the Los Angeles area - that the more adventurous music has been banished from the airwaves. If John Coltrane were to show up today, playing the music he played in the mid-60s, I doubt he would get on the air; only his Hall-of-Fame stature permits his groundbreaking later music to be heard today (and even then in small proportion to its importance). The cutting-edge music is left to experimental college radio stations - usually small and staffed by amateurs who lack the knowledge to put new music in any reasonable perspective - and increasingly to the Web, which may eventually provide the kind of exposure that jazz stations routinely offered before the 1980s, a.k.a. the Age of Greed.

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