Coming from Montreal, I am happy to report that the Montreal Jazz Festival is doing better every year. On the other hand the music presented cannot, in very many cases, be even remotely called "jazz". I am not hung up on nomenclature, believe me, but the powers-that-be at the Festival are stretching it every year. Sting has been presented last year as part of the Festival... I know, to use the words of a jazz immortal, there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. However, it's hard to get younger people interested in jazz when it is often so ill defined. The one thing is that when you go back in time, the defining lines are way easier to recognize. One last point, in a very European way, the Festival has always considered that the blues are a part of the greater realm of jazz. Maybe because I like the blues and "roots" music generally, I am very happy that this is the case. I know that when rock was closer to its blues roots, one way for a young person to reach jazz was by way of the blues; the progression being, let's say the Rolling Stones to Muddy Waters, to B. B. King to T-Bone Walker and then to Charlie Christian. I may be dreaming... Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no handy stepping-stones to jazz nowadays. In my case, if I remember, insofar as records go, inadvertently my older sister introduced me to jazz by getting a copy of "The Sound of Jazz" from the CBS record club and declaring it unlistenable before giving it to me. My other sister did the same with Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" so hand-me-downs are not always bad! Aside from the fact that I have always been curious and loved all kinds of music, never minding whether it was "in" or "out", being rejected by my seniors couldn't hurt. One point is that it is very hard to impose things like a type of music on young people (or any age group for that matter) especially so if it is seen as complicated, elitist, intellectual. In the past jazz was seen as fun and alive. That's the only hope to bring new blood in. Make it fun and alive, without losing its essential qualities.
