Disappearing Jazz?


After years of collecting all types of music except jazz and big band I'm now playing catchup.  Looking at the recordings of Ruby Braff (trumpet), Dick Hyman (piano) Roland Hanna (piano). Art Tatum (piano), Claude Bolling even the great vocalist Sarah Vaughan I find the majority of their catalog is only available used on vinyl.  There are many other names I could have included in this list - I'm gradually getting to them (Thelonious Sphere Monk, etc ).

Beyond the lack of availability what alarms me as a new collector of this genre is that there doesn't appear to be musicians to take the place of these giants.  Not to say there are no more Big Bands or jazz pianists BUT how many new artists have the hundreds of recordings these musicians created?

Is jazz disappearing?  Will streaming services eventually include recordings only available on LP? 

Feel free to offer any suggestions for other artists to collect in the traditional jazz / big band category.  I also have collected Miles, Coltrane and Bill Evans though just starting to dive into Ellington.

Hoping to find this music soon.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

bigquery

Showing 1 response by clustrocasual

Jazz, as most people think of it, flourished in particular during the 1960s-1980s which was a period of radical individual self expression and spiritual enlightenment. (An era in history known as "The Consciousness Revolution"). It was a period of breaking away from the institutionalized, conformist STEM era of the 1930s-1950s. Incidentally, the 1930s-1950s was the period Muzak was created, whose goal was to standardize all genres into inoffensive background music for worker productivity. (Hm, ring a bell these days?) If you listen to a lot of artists like Miles Davis or Bill Evans, their work changed radically by the late 60s. Jazz can exist in any period, but most of the emotionally charged and groundbreaking work was done in this period.

We’re back to the period of conformism, group participation and standardization with negative connotations attached to individualism and subjective self-expression, so art and culture is struggling. It’s not just you, everyone I know in the creative fields has noticed it. There are some artists who continue to push the limits or play with real soul, but they’re mostly underground.