Putting jazz clubs into perspective

An interview with Branford Marsalis.

MetroTimes Detroit, 5/16/07 -‘Jazz has never been popular’: "Marsalis: Jazz music has never been popular. I think that we need to get away from that lie. Jazz clubs back in the day, were considered places of counterculture. If you listen to records like John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard and Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard, what you will hear is a lot of people talking and treating the music with relative indifference. In the '50s, if you wanted to go to a cool place to hang out and have some drinks and talk, you went to a jazz club. Where were you going to go? Lawrence Welk didn't have a club where you could go to. Now they have all kinds of clubs that didn't exist back then. Whoever heard of a cigar bar or a wine bar?"

MT: In those venues the music is secondary to the ambience and the socializing.

Marsalis: The music has always been secondary; that is why you hear people talking. Jazz has never been popular. I think that is just a common thing to say, and I don't know why. Just for research purposes, you should get the Time magazine with Thelonious Monk on the cover [from 1964] and read the entire article. What you'll notice is there's very little in that article about jazz music. It's more focused on the personality and jazz as a lifestyle. The American aesthetic has always viewed all music as a form of entertainment. Any idea of music as an art has always been something that America has rejected since we have had a country.