In June, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the results of a survey that showed the median age of the jazz audience has, since 1982, increased from 29 to 46 while diminishing in size by nearly a third. “It's no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak," said arts critic Terry Teachout in a response to the survey in the Wall Street Journal.
Others argued the numbers weren't trustworthy, or that the survey didn't include stats from 2008-09. Or that the word jazz was too vague, or that its findings were just flat-out wrong: “Our problem is not getting the kids to turn out for our shows--the kids are frequently the only people who turn out," said composer/bandleader Darcy James Argue in a blog post. “Our problem is getting everyone else to take a break from fetishizing the jazz of 50 years ago and pay attention to what's happening right now."
That may be the problem. Even “the kids" that Argue and other forward-thinking jazz musicians are seeing at their gigs aren't representative of the mainstream; they come from the music-geeky fringe, the college-radio crowd. The Beyonce- and Taylor Swift-loving masses see jazz as it's usually presented to them on TV, film, and even on the few remaining jazz radio stations: as a relic, a link to the past. Audiences are not lured through the suggestion that a music's best moments came long before they (and, increasingly, their parents) were born.
