No one wants to believe bad news, and in the jazz world, where we already spend most of our time bemoaning this or that, real bad news seems even worse. I certainly don't want to believe the news that the Undead Jazzfest and the Winter Jazzfest have been paying musicians so little that they felt the need to create a petition to demand some kind of minimum wage.
There are two reasons jazz critics should feel especially bad about this. One, it proves us wrong, and second, it shows us up. On the first count, both of these festivals have been touted by critics (including me) as the model other jazz festivals should follow, or at least take more notice of. Winter Jazzfest 2011 drew a huge number of people, and the groups that played there were, for the most part, groups that didn't have large slots in the fancy summer festivals. Yes, there were flaws, but overall the consensus was that this was a people's festival, a musician's festival. On the second count, festivals have been a big feature of the jazz internet recently - but not because of pay. Peter Hum and others have started discussions on whether or not "jazz" festivals should feature non-jazz acts as prominently as they do. These discussions certainly included some speculation on the pay of, say, Elvis Costello versus the pay of Ben Allison, but with a festival like Undead, where the focus is squarely on jazz not just in name but in content, the question never really came up.
The fact that jazz musicians do not get paid enough for what they do has been a running joke and running complaint for decades. But I fear that that complaint is being lost beneath non-issues. So what if Elvis Costello headlines at a jazz festival? If you don't want to see him, head to another tent. Who cares if jazz is popular with a large amount of people? Popularity, one must remember, does not often beget quality - it must happen the other way around.
In 2011, we can point to a handful of jazz musicians, the musicians who win Grammys year after year, who make an album every two years and play only the best venues, and say, "Look how far we've come." Except we can't. Herbie Hancock aside, the jazz musician's life is just has hard today as in 1955. Yes, the country has moved beyond the racial discrimination of those years, but the jazz life finds other ways to frustrate: record labels are on the rocks, and self-releasing is often a quick road to obscurity; there are less clubs, which means more demand for booking, which means less booking (and higher prices for the customers, which draws less revenue for the club and thus less pay for musicians); there are less jazz clubs in the United States as a whole, which means touring usually happens in Europe, with all the accompanying plane fares and train fares and so on and so forth.
As the saga of the Undead continues, then, let me close with this: shut up and go pay for some music.
