Into The Music
Jazz has a marketing problem that it has had for decades and mostly does not care about. The genre resists the simplifications that make things easy to explain at a party. It does not have a fixed beat or a reliable emotional register or a central figure who functions as a clear entry point for newcomers. It rewards patience in a streaming environment that punishes it. And yet something is happening with jazz right now that is harder to explain than mere survival.
The numbers, to the extent that jazz numbers are tracked and reported, suggest an audience that is younger than the conventional narrative would have it. The conventional narrative holds that jazz is attended by people who remember when jazz was contemporary, that its concert venues are full of grey hair, that it is maintaining a holding pattern until its existing audience ages out. This narrative has been wrong for at least a decade and is getting more wrong by the year.
What changed, and when, is a question that has multiple answers. The most commonly cited one is Kamasi Washington’s The Epic, a three-hour debut released in 2015 that treated jazz not as a museum piece but as a vehicle for the same kind of overwhelming ambition that people associate with the most serious rock and hip-hop. It was an argument made in music: this form can do anything you think music is supposed to do. A lot of people heard that argument.
But the explanation that begins with Kamasi misses what was already happening. Robert Glasper had been building a bridge between jazz and hip-hop for years before 2015, releasing records that sat at the intersection without apologizing for either side. In London, a generation of musicians coming out of Tomorrow’s Warriors and the Guildhall were developing a sound that drew on grime and garage and dubstep alongside the American jazz tradition. Shabaka Hutchings, whose various projects have been among the most celebrated British jazz recordings of the last ten years, emerged from that context. So did Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, and a loose collective of musicians who collectively made London one of the most interesting cities in the world for new jazz.
What these musicians share is not a style but an attitude toward material. They treat jazz as a method rather than a genre, a way of approaching sound and collaboration and improvisation that can be applied to any underlying material. The results can sound like jazz in the conventional sense, or they can sound like something that does not have a name yet. Both outcomes are acceptable. The method is what matters.
This is part of why jazz functions as a point of arrival for musicians from other genres. Flea releasing a trumpet record this week is not him abandoning rock for jazz. It is him finding a method that allows for the kind of exploration that rock’s structures, at the level he has been operating at for thirty years, no longer offer. André 3000 made the same move. Others have made it before and will make it after.
The streaming question is genuinely complicated. Jazz does not generate the numbers that pop or hip-hop generate on any platform. But it has found a specific kind of value in the algorithm’s long tail, where dedicated listeners stream particular records repeatedly and keep certain artists alive in ways that would not have been financially viable in the CD era. The economics are strange and partial, but they exist.
What feels true about jazz right now, watching it from the outside, is that it is carrying on the work it has always done without much concern for whether the mainstream notices. The mainstream, periodically and unpredictably, does notice. Kamasi Washington appearing on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was one such moment. Flea’s album being covered as a significant event this week is another, smaller one. The accumulation of these moments does not amount to a jazz revival in the tabloid sense. But it does suggest a genre that has stopped losing ground and started gaining it, quietly and on its own terms.
That has always been how jazz works best anyway.
The observation that jazz resists simplification is one I have been trying to communicate to students for thirty years, with mixed results. In my experience, the genre asks something of its listeners that popular music rarely demands , genuine patience with uncertainty. When students in Accra first encountered Miles Davis or Coltrane, the instinct was always to wait for the resolution that never quite arrived. That is not a marketing problem so much as a philosophical one. I am glad more ears are finding their way to it, whatever the reason.
ok this title is sending me because YES!! jazz has always been doing the most and we just weren’t paying attention?? I got into jazz through this fusion playlist someone recommended and now I literally cannot stop listening , there’s this quality in the best jazz improvisation that reminds me of the way a really good Mandopop vocal line will just drift away from where you expect it to go and somehow land somewhere better. the rest of music noticing is SO overdue 🎷✨
The marketing problem framing is interesting but I’d push back slightly , jazz’s resistance to simplification is precisely what’s made it so durable as an influence on commercial music. Producers have been sampling and borrowing from it for decades because the harmonic complexity gives pop tracks depth without requiring the listener to understand why. The genre doesn’t need better marketing, it needs better attribution.