Yesterday, John Kreicbergs, proprietor of Patchchord.com, sent me a letter in response to this week's Wayward Son that presents the KC jazz problem better than I ever could have. With his permission, I reprint it here:
RE: Haddix's response
I too respect Chuck -- who doesn't -- but it's hard to respect a scene that doesn't respect itself.
I've been hitting the jazz clubs in KC since I was wee high school lad, humbled by the fact that places like the Phoenix and the Plaza III at the time would look me over with a suspicious eye, take my cover money, and shoot me a "try to order liquor and you'll be out of here faster than Bird looking for his next fix" look. This arrangement allowed me to catch live jazz on a regular basis as an aspiring high school jazz hack that needed more than dusty records and reissues to get a better appreciation and understanding of the art.
But I digress...
Ultimately, I don't get the feeling that the club owners in this town truly embrace the scene. Instead, they typically pander to the Disney experience. Not to name names (*cough* David Basse *cough*), but these are folks that are content to mug it up for dinner set. They're the safe choice for the club owners that don't want anything too progressive, too out there, too (gasp) modern. They rarely respect the artists enough to charge a cover, which sends a signal to the audience that they're not really required to listen.
Haddix bitches about your coverage of the Record Bar, but we know why folks go there: for the music. Why do folks go to places like Jardine's or the Phoenix or any of those other clubs? To eat or to drink or to network with their fellow gray-haired Jazz Ambassadors...to see and be seen. It's a joke. When owners stop challenging their acts to truly perform, the performers stop challenging their audience to really listen. Eventually, what you get is a bunch of gigging musicians doling out safe performances that will insure they get the call for next week.
Yawn.
There's a larger problem at work here too, though, and that deals with the state of jazz as a genre. Sure, all musical scenes and styles have a sense of heritage and history and the constant pull for revivalism is always strong (hence the current trend of early 80's post-punk Britpop that all the kids are grooving on these days) but no one does it WORSE than jazz. When reissues and archive recordings consistently sell better than anything new that's happening, you have a genre that's relegated to being an anachronism rather than a vital voice in an ongoing artistic dialogue.
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