Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.
I'm concerned with trend. I don't know where jazz fans will come from 20 years from now.
Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.
Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.
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.
You can't just say jazz is dead.
Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.
Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.
When you limit the word 'jazz' to one period of history, for the people who love that period, then maybe it can be dead because nobody plays like that anymore. But jazz is progressive music; it always has to progress, and musicians always have to find new landscapes and new ways to speak out, so of course it's always changing.
They say that Jazz is back, and I don't think it's gone anywhere. But they say it's back.
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.
When pop and rock were taking over from jazz, and Sinatra was covering a Beatles song, it was all very new. I get to come at it from a different direction.
A lot of the commercial world wants to bank in on the cachet that jazz brings.
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
Jazz was uplifted by what I did.
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.
I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.
