das hier hatten wir vielleicht schonmal, ein super interessanter Artikel ueber den Niedergang des Smooth Jazz (und Smooth Jazz Radio, das geht Hand in Hand), schon was aelter (also: auch aelter als das Jahr 2019, das drueber steht)… hatte ich jetzt fast eher wegen der Diskussion im Tenorsax thread nochmal rausgesucht… mE ist ein grosser Teil von Fusion in den 80ern und 90ern einfach aus unserem Blickfeld als Jazzfans gewandert… aber der Artikel passt natuerlich auch sehr gut zu der Clinton Inauguraution… ich weiss selber noch wie ich damals als Schueler in San Diego diese Jazzsender auf meinem kleinen Radio gefunden hab, nur um zu erkennen, dass dort rund um die Uhr nur Unfug lief… (mit etwas suchen gab es aber auch noch einen zweiten Jazzsender, der gescheite Musik spielte – heute waere das alles sicher anders)
Eine repraesentative Passage:
“As a musician,” Veasley confides, “I couldn’t always quite get it-the enthusiasm people had for this music that’s sort of in between. It doesn’t have the spontaneity of straight-ahead jazz, and it doesn’t have the sure-headed, shake-ya-thang groove of R&B and pop. It’s somewhere in between. But you had that baby-boomer audience that was more than passionate about it.” When WJJZ pulled the plug on smooth jazz in September 2008, Veasley was amazed by the listener e-mails. “It was almost like someone died,” he remembers. “You know the stages of grief? People were incredulous. You had folks who were angry, folks who were hurt, folks with an overwhelming sadness[..]”
[Jeff Lorber: “the problem] has to do with the way these big corporations bundle their advertising. For whatever reason the smooth-jazz demographic didn’t work into that plan.”
One factor might have been that the smooth-jazz crowd is heavily mixed. “That was a revelation to me,” Veasley says, “when I started playing concerts and seeing how racially diverse the audience was. I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what it should be. It can’t be anything but good.’ When I got involved on the other side of the glass I started to understand that it was exactly the wrong recipe for radio sales. In other words, to go in and say, ‘Wow, we have this audience that is 50-50 white and black, male and female, with a wide age demographic’-that doesn’t appeal to people who pay for radio.”
(einfach in einem privaten Fenster oeffnen, falls paywall erscheint)
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