The Resurgence of Jazz: Reconnecting with Popular Culture

The Bridge Between Jazz Singers and Popular Culture

For years I have been hearing gloomy predictions about the future of jazz. They said this genre would inevitably become irrelevant, or survive only as a musical museum exhibit. But however bleak these prophecies sounded, they were quite far from reality. None of them foresaw what is happening now on the jazz scene, these unexpected and equally delightful developments.

From what I have observed, even as the jazz-rock fusion movement lost momentum in the 1980s and 1990s and shifted toward a softer jazz sound, a group of artists found ways to reach mass audiences without diluting their art. In this period, singers played a key role in keeping jazz connected to commercial music. Many times, jazz vocalists even produced hit records — earning gold and platinum certifications that, at the end of the twentieth century, had been thought impossible.

Bobby McFerrin's story has always moved me. In 1988, his song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" climbed to the top of the Billboard charts — the first time in history that an a cappella song had achieved that. It was impossible to doubt McFerrin's talent: few jazz singers could rival him in intonation, improvisational skill, or charismatic stage presence. But his indifference to the music industry's expectations was as extreme as his vocal gift. The first time I heard him, with no record yet released, he stepped up to the microphone alone as an opening act and began improvising — without any structure or plan — vocalizing, clapping, and slapping his chest. I thought this young singer was bound to fail. But that night he conquered a skeptical crowd by sheer audacity and talent.

Artists such as Eva Cassidy and Norah Jones also reached commercial success. Cassidy's recordings sold more than ten million copies after her death from melanoma at age thirty-three in 1996. Jones's 2002 debut album "Come Away with Me" went on to sell, astonishingly, twenty-five million copies. For a time, the appetite for this music — and for Jones's hit single "Don't Know Why" in particular — burned so high that this single artist accounted for more than half the jazz CDs sold at many retail stores.

Diana Krall, Jamie Cullum, Kurt Elling, and Gregory Porter have also continued to build bridges between popular culture and jazz. Krall is at her best when she is emotionally open, and few jazz singers can convert old songs into convincingly modern expressions the way she can. Cullum's album "Twentysomething" sold three million copies; Elling has kept the bohemian spirit of the Beat Generation alive; and Porter has reached a wide audience that cuts across traditional genre lines with his radio-friendly, R&B-inflected vocals.

A New Generation of Jazz Virtuosi

One of the artists who has most impressed me is Cécile McLorin Salvant. Her win at the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition turned her almost overnight from an unknown American singer living in France into a high-profile jazz star. She quickly began conquering everything in her path: she topped four categories in Downbeat's poll, including rising star and album of the year, and won multiple Grammy Awards before her thirtieth birthday.

But there is, at first glance, a bit of mystery in this. Salvant adopts none of the familiar crossover strategies. She does not try to absorb fashionable sounds and styles, and she apparently pays little attention to what others are doing to boost their YouTube views. Her albums are filled with the most unexpected building blocks: old Haitian poems, forgotten blues songs, opera arias, pop songs from her grandparents' generation, vaudeville material, folklore... But the variety of sources is far less interesting than what Salvant does with them. Somehow, against all odds, she makes everything old feel absolutely current — through nothing more than her interpretive skill on stage.

Jacob Collier takes a completely different approach. While still a teenager, he reached global fame thanks to a series of dazzling YouTube performances that presented him as an impressive one-man orchestra via multitrack recording and split-screen video. Sometimes these videos showcased Collier singing six separate parts in intricate a cappella arrangements; at other times he added piano, bass, and percussion — again playing everything himself. In some cases the screen split into twelve or more panels, each showing one of the layered components of these performances.

In the past, Collier would have needed a record deal first; in his case, however, he did not release a commercial album until 2016 — a full five years after he had started building an online following. This says a lot about the messy nature of jazz today. At times, Collier looks less like a jazz musician than like an experimental scientist. Even so, a jazz sensibility shows through at every step and serves as the main impulse pushing him into new territory. Why not? Jazz has always benefited from a carefree willingness to take chances with whatever tools are at hand, and there is no reason that attitude — once applied to trumpets and saxophones — should not also be applied to web platforms and software.

Misconceptions About the Death of Jazz

When I think back, I remember just how widespread rumors of jazz's death were. I still recall the disappointment I felt in 2012, when The Atlantic published a positive review of one of my books under the headline "The End of Jazz" and added a subheading explaining "how America's most vital music had been reduced to a relic." I was angry, but I couldn't blame the writer. He was simply voicing the general view of the opinion leaders.

In 2007, Esquire magazine went so far as to declare "The Death of Jazz" right in its title — and added that the genre had been in decline since John Coltrane's death forty years earlier. Around the same time, critic Marc Myers published a piece on the JazzWax website titled "Who Killed Jazz, and When?" He reached a similar conclusion but pointed to an earlier cause for the decline: the late-1940s decision by jazz groups to stop playing for dancers. When CNN took up the same subject in a piece titled "When Did Jazz Stop Being Cool?", the guilty parties had now become The Beatles and rock 'n' roll. Other commentators focused on different underlying causes for the music's aging, painting a picture in which everyone from elitist fans to narcissistic artists shared part of the blame. The conclusion: jazz had long been on life support, and it was time to put this dear old thing out of its misery.

It has been a few years since I last saw any of these pained jazz obituaries, and a different kind of news has taken their place. Big-print headlines now announce a "new age of jazz," a "new jazz revival," or the arrival of "a new groove" that is "bringing jazz back to the people." In many cases, the same magazines that recently buried jazz have become the most enthusiastic about heralding its rebirth. Even given pop culture media's short attention span, this is a remarkable turnaround. And it raises an obvious question: how did a century-old genre get its groove back?

The Turn to Jazz by Popular Music Stars

Interestingly, many of the important signs of this shift first appeared outside the jazz world. David Bowie released his final recording Blackstar in January 2016, just two days before his death. This project — on which the rock star was surrounded by jazz musicians — was intense and demanding music, but it was later named the best album of the year by many critics. Around the same time, Lady Gaga entered into an unexpected partnership with Tony Bennett, who was almost exactly sixty years older than she. The pop star traded her contemporary sound for old jazz standards. It didn't look like a promising commercial venture, but the resulting album Cheek to Cheek topped the Billboard chart and earned both artists a Grammy.

Just a few weeks later, Bob Dylan released an album of jazz-oriented songs associated with Frank Sinatra, and shortly after that Prince launched a stripped-down "piano and microphone" tour that showcased the more jazz-leaning side of his musical persona. Hip-hop artists were moving in the same direction, and none more effectively than Kendrick Lamar, who featured rising jazz star Kamasi Washington on To Pimp a Butterfly. The album received eleven Grammy nominations — at the time the most ever for a rap musician.

Against all odds, jazz was making its way back into pop culture — not as a marketing gimmick, but as part of a change in attitude led by the day's leading commercial stars. The most interesting thing was that you would not hear most of this music on jazz radio stations. In fact, this music often had only a loose connection with the jazz typically played there. But this only underscores the broader significance of these developments — namely, that pop culture icons were turning to jazz not because they wanted to become jazz artists, but because of a growing sense that this century-old idiom could serve as a kind of touchstone for musical excellence and craft. After decades of marginalization, jazz had come out the other side. Rather than disappearing or surviving in the shadows as an esoteric practice or a dusty museum piece, it was re-emerging as something important — even essential.

The New Pioneers of Jazz

Artists like Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Flying Lotus, and Esperanza Spalding have played a pioneering role in jazz's revival. No figure demonstrates the expanding dialogue between jazz and commercial music that is currently pushing the genre into the spotlight more than Washington. While many jazz festivals feel the need to program rock and pop acts to boost ticket sales, Washington has reversed the trend. Rock festivals have started turning to him to get crowds moving with high-voltage jazz. With reckless confidence, he has carried the saxophone into the heart of pop culture — appearing at Coachella, Lollapalooza, and other venues where horn players are rarely invited — and somehow, against all odds, he has triumphed.

Robert Glasper is another important artist looking for common ground between jazz and popular music styles. On his first album for Blue Note, Canvas (2005), he worked almost entirely within the confines of post-bop acoustic jazz piano, displaying a rich harmonic palette and a delicate touch on the instrument. In subsequent projects, however, Glasper would try every imaginable method to update the jazz tradition. On the follow-up album In My Element (2007), he began to add small doses of danceable rhythms and samples, and presented a striking mash-up of Herbie Hancock's jazz composition "Maiden Voyage" with the rock band Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place." This was just the prelude to the broad efforts of the next decade. During this period Glasper expanded his arsenal with electric keyboards and other plugged-in instruments, and would increasingly lean on vocalists, rappers, laptop effects, and elements drawn from the dominant commercial genres.

Esperanza Spalding, born in Portland, Oregon, in 1984, has pursued a similar outreach program in a more personalized way. When she wants to add a pop flavor to her pieces, she generally writes her own lyrics and sings them herself, only rarely calling on high-profile guest vocalists. And she does it so effectively that she could leave jazz behind and sustain a successful contemporary singer-songwriter career. When she ventures into Latin music, she can sing in Spanish or Portuguese and play Brazilian music with extraordinary fluency. She moves from traditional acoustic jazz to plugged-in commercial styles with equal ease. Perhaps the most daring statement of her self-sufficiency, however, was the 2017 project Exposure, in which Spalding made an entire album in seventy-seven hours and broadcast the entire process live on Facebook. On September 12, 2017, at 9 a.m., she walked into a studio in North Hollywood with nothing prepared and, over the next three days, managed to compose, arrange, and record ten tracks.

Jazz and Technology

When I analyze these artists' stories, I see that jazz has not only survived but has also been able to adapt to — and even fold into its improvisational process — the new platforms and intermediaries reshaping the music world. The shift from physical albums to digital music has not been costless, and many artists (jazz musicians included) have seen their earnings fall as a result. But new technology always also opens up support for creative expression. Over the long run, jazz has proved its adaptability: it not only survives the new waves of change and disruption, it also uses them.

Look at the music's timeline. It is no coincidence that jazz first emerged shortly after the rise of the record industry: in an earlier age, improvisations were difficult to preserve and almost impossible to package and offer for sale on the market. By serving as permanent repositories for this spontaneous music, recordings helped push the jazz idiom into a global market.

Every following decade saw jazz revived by other emerging technologies. When the new microphones were introduced in the late 1920s, jazz artists were among the first to grasp that they made possible a more nuanced — even whispered — vocal delivery. Singing would never be the same after that intervention. When radio and live broadcasting picked up speed in the 1930s, jazz bandleaders were among the first to understand their potential for bringing the energy of live performance into listeners' homes. The Swing Era was the inevitable result. Whenever new instruments were invented over the course of the century — the vibraphone, the electric guitar, the Hammond organ, and so on — the jazz community embraced them, even when most people saw them as mere novelties or useless gadgets.

In many cases, jazz musicians were the actual innovators introducing groundbreaking technologies. Jazz composer Raymond Scott laid the foundation for the music synthesizer at Manhattan Research, the operation he founded in 1946. Around the same time, Bing Crosby provided financial backing to Ampex, the company that revolutionized high-quality sound recording with the introduction of magnetic tape systems. Guitarist Les Paul was involved in everything from instrument design to multi-track recording, and his impact as an inventor exceeds even his considerable impact as a performer. There is no recording studio anywhere in the world today that does not use techniques that emerged from his homemade experiments.

The Enduring Spirit of Jazz

Jazz's capacity for continuous self-renewal has shown me that the music can escape the fate of being replaced or killed off by technical gadgets. It can embrace technology, move along with it, and bend it to its own ends. In reality, we are not engaged in a struggle with musical styles and technologies — we are negotiating which musical attitudes will be carried forward into the future.

This is because, after more than a century of morphing and blending, jazz is now defined less by specific musical components than by its attitudes. It no longer rests merely on blue notes and syncopations; instead, it builds its sonic structures on a different foundation — a commitment to spontaneity, an openness to ongoing musical dialogue, a devotion to craft, a trust in the human element, a celebration of the creative process, and a willing readiness to investigate the unknown.

In our technology-driven future, these aspects of the music are unlikely to age. In fact, they may be exactly what we need to grow and flourish. Today's jazz artists are the closest anyone has come to fulfilling Herbie Hancock's claim that jazz is "the new classical music of the planet." With an inexhaustible sense of curiosity and discovery, they have the potential to tell "the story of humanity" by drawing on local musical traditions, current technologies, and forms of expression from a variety of media. In that sense, jazz is not just a relic of the past but a vision of the future.

I see the rebirth of jazz as a precious spirit that has spread across every musical genre of the last decade. It reminds us that beauty comes from spontaneity, from unexpected encounters, and — most importantly — from really listening to one another's voices. These lessons are more valuable than ever in today's complex, rapidly changing world.