Jazz has an audience all around the globe and has had for many decades, I think speaking of the United States, let's say that what we need is more of an official recognition.
I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.
Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.
No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.
I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.
As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.
If you're in jazz and more than ten people like you, you're labeled commercial.
When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff.
So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.
A lot of jazz is like that; it sells over a period of time.
I want an audience that we might call a pop audience. Cross over to pop. Cross over to R&B. And bring those people to Brubeck and Chick Corea, you dig? A lot of people found Dave Brubeck and Chick Corea because they came to hear 'We're in This Love Together' and 'After All.'
The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.
They always say that jazz doesn't sell, but it's a lie, because it does sell, and it sells consistently year in and year out.
