Enlarge Mykola Velychko/iStockPhoto

Pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger says it "seems insurmountable" to develop jazz audiences in the face of the dominant culture.

Mykola Velychko/iStockPhoto

Pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger says it "seems insurmountable" to develop jazz audiences in the face of the dominant culture.

Last week, we published a much-discussed blog post about the connection — or lack thereof — between jazz education and the development of new audiences. It examined a viewpoint by pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger, and concluded by challenging Ellenberger to suggest some ways to win new audiences. Here is Ellenberger's response. —Ed.

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

Kurt Ellenberger.

Courtesy of the artist

Kurt Ellenberger.

Since my Huffington Post article on jazz education and audience development, many (including this very blog) have asked "Well, if education isn't the answer, what's the solution? How do we develop and maintain a strong jazz audience?"

Audience development is a complicated issue, and it's not limited to jazz. Every artist and arts organization is trying to answer the same question. We've identified a problem and we're going to "build" something to solve it. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?

It's not simple. It's so complex, in fact, that I think that the question itself is actually a linguistic deception, a euphemism perhaps, that cleverly masks the enormity of the task. When we ask "How do we develop and maintain a strong jazz audience?" what we are really saying is "How can we convince millions of people to alter and expand their aesthetic sensibilities and their cultural proclivities so that they include jazz to such an extent that they will regularly attend concerts and purchase recordings?" And that statement itself is embedded within another Herculean task: "How can we convince people to embrace music that is no longer part of the popular culture?"

Enlarge Courtesy of Jason Crane

Jason Crane.

Courtesy of Jason Crane

Jason Crane.

Usually, it's the musicians who go on tour, and the journalists who write about them for local publications. But one journalist is taking to the road to talk to musicians where they live.

As of today, Jason Crane has produced 374 episodes of The Jazz Session, a podcast of interviews with top jazz musicians. Last week, he announced he was going on a "World Tour."

Starting June 1, he'll be interviewing musicians in cities large and small throughout the eastern and southeastern United States, all the while reading and writing original poetry. (He hopes to eventually make the tour actually international, or at least to go west of the Mississippi River.) He has only a loose itinerary; he plans to buy a Greyhound bus pass and eventually end up in New Orleans, crashing on couches of friends, acquaintances and strangers. He's seeking crowdfunding and logistical support at The Jazz Session website.

Crane, 38, once supported himself as a working soprano saxophonist and later, as the station manager at Jazz90.1 in Rochester, N.Y. He recently moved to New York City in part to be closer to the jazz scene. So why is he taking to the road again? Over e-mail last week, I sent him a few questions to find out, and he was happy to respond:

iStockPhoto

Which 10 albums would you give to a jazz neophyte?

Among the notable musician deaths of this week was go-go pioneer Chuck Brown. As prelude to this week's links, I find it fascinating how jazz so directly led into something that could be called an original musical style. See: the Washington Post obituary, and YouTube footage of a "Go-Go Swing [It Don't Mean A Thing]/Midnight Sun/Moody's Mood For Love" medley. And now:

• This story is titled "Top Ten Jazz Albums for People Who Don't Know S— About Jazz." Let the debates begin. From Sean O'Connell/LA Weekly.
• DownBeat magazine has slowly been sprucing up its web presence. You'll see some current news and concert reports on the left-hand column, plus some editors' recommendations. The layout for archival material is a bit improved and it appears that some ad support is coming too.
• Gil Evans centennial celebrations are happening this week in New York. Nate Chinen writes about efforts to deliver the great composer/arranger's repertoire, including some new discoveries. Also from Chinen: Dafnis Prieto takes us through his day in uptown New York, when he isn't making next-level percussion things around the world.
• The Cabaret Card rules in New York had an awful lot of sway in who got to have careers in music prior to 1967. Nate Chinen gives the synopsis for JazzTimes.
• Taylor Eigsti, who came onto the scene as a piano prodigy a decade or so ago, also writes pieces for orchestra. (He's only 27.) He returns to his hometown for a performance with the Oakland-East Bay Symphony this week. From Richard Scheinin/San Jose Mercury News.
• Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran (his wife) just curated a week of performances at the Whitney Biennial. Ben Ratliff sums it up.
• Sidney Bechet, the first jazz review ever and the relationship between journalism and the "feeling" in black-origin music. From New England Public Radio.
• Don Cherry in the 1960s is the subject of this week's Night Lights, from WFIU.
• Latin jazz in the Bay Area is the subject of a documentary in progress. The Latin Jazz Corner has a short interview.
• Before Peggy Lee was great singer Peggy Lee — quite literally — she was a teenage train depot agent in North Dakota.
• Milton Babbitt's seminal "Who Cares if You Listen" article (opens PDF). Contributor Alex W. Rodriguez, himself a Ph.D. candidate, reminded me of this viewpoint with respect to the movement of jazz toward the academy.
• Two major musicologists argue to save the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. Testaments to this place's importance continue to pour in.
• "Hyatt Hotel Heir Denies He's Spent $100 Mil on Unfinished Jazz Film," reads the Forbes headline. You'll note that NPR first covered this story in 2007, when the filmmaker's "side-project" movie about Louis Armstrong had a different working title.
• Ted Panken's archives this week: a Jackie McLean remembrance.
• JazzWax has a variety of features up.
• The Jazz Session spoke with vocalist Maria Neckam and the trio of Colin Stranahan, Glenn Zaleski and Rick Rosato. It also announced a tour which we'll have more information about next week.
• The Checkout sat down with the great Chico Hamilton, and arranger Ryan Truesdell, who has arranged some newly-discovered Gil Evans charts.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Enlarge Rick Nederstigt/AFP/Getty Images

Toots Thielemans performs at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands in July 2005. He's celebrating his 90th birthday with a series of concerts throughout his native Belgium.

Rick Nederstigt/AFP/Getty Images

Toots Thielemans performs at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands in July 2005. He's celebrating his 90th birthday with a series of concerts throughout his native Belgium.

People throughout Belgium are currently celebrating the harmonica player and guitarist Jean-Baptiste "Toots" Thielemans, born in Brussels on April 29, 1922. That puts the NEA Jazz Master, also made a Baron by the King of Belgium in 2001, just a few days past 90.

The night after his birthday, Thielemans set out on an eight-concert tour across his homeland. In Ghent, Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine joined him as a special guest. In Brussels, his long-time pianist Kenny Werner and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves came from the U.S. and Brazil, respectively. In Hasselt, Thielemans — who had broken his foot — performed from a wheelchair. And last night and tonight, May 17 and 18, the two final concerts take place in Liège and then Dinant. It's all taking place in a country where everyone can pronounce the name "Thielemans." (Try "teel-mahnz.")

Invited by the Belgian Tourist Office, I attended his May 9 performance at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a.k.a. BOZAR (get it?), in Brussels. The interviews and meet-and-greets were canceled, but the concert was sold out and a great success.

Thielemans entered to roaring applause. His band members helped him cross the stage to perch on a high chair so his feet could dangle and clap together. He looks frail, but his breath support and musicality seem little diminished. Just the sound of his Hohner harmonica brings joy and sadness together, and sweetly so.

The late alto saxophone giant Jackie McLean would have been 81 this week. He died after a long illness in 2006, but continued performing and teaching until late in his life. One of the last songs he wrote and recorded was "Mr. E," which leads off his 1998 septet album Fire and Love.

I'm thinking of it because I recently heard another version of the song by the much younger alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and his trio. Their take on "Mr. E" comes from a recording called Dialect Fluorescent, which came out just a few months ago.

"I really love the composition," Lehman said. "I love the way the melody is structured; I love the way that the harmony is set up. And I think it's really ingenious, actually, the way that every aspect of the composition ... is really set up to create a kind of musical framework that at once is really grounded, and gives you a kind of sense of place and sound as a listener, but also has an incredible amount of flexibility and is kind of malleable as musical material."

Obviously, Lehman likes the tune — but I suspected that there was more to it than that. I had read that Lehman studied with McLean, and I knew that Lehman had even written an academic paper about McLean. And if you listen closely to the two saxophonists, you'll notice a certain strident overtone to both, an quality that Lehman's recent press material describes as a "bracing, McLean-tinged saxophone sound."

There's a deeper connection here. So I gave Lehman a call yesterday to find out about it. During our conversation, the words "state-of-the-art" kept coming up.

Enlarge andynew/Flickr

Saxophonist Paul Dunmall and drummer Mark Sanders perform (with guitarist Hasse Poulsen, off camera) at The Vortex in London.

andynew/Flickr

Saxophonist Paul Dunmall and drummer Mark Sanders perform (with guitarist Hasse Poulsen, off camera) at The Vortex in London.

As an acclaimed pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer is able to perform his music in concert halls and jazz clubs around the world. But few venues are quite like the one he played May 1-2 of this year.

Yesterday the BBC's Jazz on 3 posted a live recording of a new song by the Vijay Iyer Trio — too new, even, for the band's 2012 album Accelerando. The song is called "Hood":

"Hood" is a tribute to the Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, and I think you'll agree it's an incredible thing for an acoustic piano trio to do. (Iyer's trio has actually been performing the song for a little while, as it did when NPR Music recorded a full concert in January.) If you listen carefully, you'll notice the applause is that of an intimate room, not a cavernous performing arts center or theater. Indeed, the credits reveal: "Recorded at The Vortex, London on 1 May 2012."

Being a guy who helps to record jazz concerts, I wondered: What kind of club is The Vortex that the Vijay Iyer Trio would play there, and that the BBC would record it? It's certainly not the first Vortex recording for the BBC, I gather, so I searched for more about the venue.

I found that The Vortex is a lot like many small jazz clubs — except nobody is paid to work there. Check out this short documentary video:

Enlarge iStockPhoto

As jazz education has expanded, have jazz audiences increased any?

iStockPhoto

As jazz education has expanded, have jazz audiences increased any?

In a recent Huffington Post submission, pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger writes about what he calls "the education fallacy": the premise that an increase in music education will lead to increased audiences. He's writing here about classical music, but draws a parallel with jazz:

On the education spending issue, it's common to hear musicians say, "well, we're not spending enough, that's why we're not building classical music audiences — we need to spend more on education." I return to Jazz Education, where we went from spending very little, to spending hundreds of millions, with nothing to show for it in regards to audience development. Why did the jazz audience decline, not grow, as the spending rapidly increased? Is there any reason to think that more spending would succeed with classical music where it has failed with jazz?

As evidence that jazz education has "failed" to produce new audiences, Ellenberger cites data demonstrating the proliferation of jazz education in colleges, summer camps and high schools. At the same time, he also states that discussions like the Jazz Audiences Initiative are responses to declining jazz audiences.

Ellenberger, I gather, is also on faculty at Grand Valley State University, and from that perch once helped to produce jazz concerts himself. (He plays in the Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble once featured on NPR's Weekend Edition.) That is, he's seen the shifts in education spending and audience decline in person. As he is paid to be a jazz educator, it seems unlikely that he's attacking the entire system that supports him — just its efficacy at seeding jazz audiences.

I find this perspective compelling, but also a bit frustrating.

Enlarge Diane Labommbarbe/iStockPhoto

Do conservatories produce "cookie cutter" musicians? (At least they'll be able to play a certain Jimmy Heath blues well.)

Diane Labommbarbe/iStockPhoto

Do conservatories produce "cookie cutter" musicians? (At least they'll be able to play a certain Jimmy Heath blues well.)

More links from this week:

• Interesting discussions at George Colligan's blog this week. An informed opinion on the charge that music schools produce "cookie cutter" musicians. Some thoughts on sight reading, that misunderstood skill among the jazz community. And a low brass forum erupts.
• At the WBGO blog, there are interviews with master drummer and educator Charlie Persip and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who you may know has recently put out a new studio album. Also, memories of Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette from the JazzSet vaults.
• Capsulocity is a short video interview series with young (mostly jazz) musicians in New York. We mentioned it earlier this week but only in passing.
• This week in Esperanza Spalding: JazzTimes cover story. From one of A Blog Supreme's newest contributors.
• Guitarist Vernon Reid briefly talks Spectrum Road, the new jazz-rock supergroup with Jack Bruce (of Cream), John Medeski and Cindy Blackman Santana.
• Pianist Myra Melford is one of five winners of the 2012 Alpert Awards in the Arts. The award is worth $75,000.
• Lester Young, clarinetist. He was known as a tenor saxophonist, of course, but also kept a cheap metal clarinet on his arsenal. From Aesthetic, Not Anesthetic, who also recontextualizes, say, early cornetist Red Nichols.
• A new film about jazz in India is out. And the Times article manages to avoid all "Calcutta Cutie" references.
• The Jazz Gallery, a New York venue supporting emerging artists, needs to move and raise a whole bunch of money to do it. (NPR Music has recorded live from the Gallery in recent years.) Howard Mandel reports.
• More on Cecil Taylor, who is being feted this month in New York. Seth Colter Walls reviews an early tribute.
• At last, an obituary for iconic jazz matron Phoebe Jacobs.
• Bix Beiderbecke's prep school dorm room is being destroyed.
• Destination: Out posts a rare Cecil Taylor bit.
• The Jazz Session spoke with pianist George Colligan and saxophonist Steve Lehman.
• The Checkout features student jazz ensemble recordings, from WBGO's celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

The Fringe is Bob Gullotti, drums; John Lockwood, bass; and George Garzone, saxophone.

Courtesy of the artist

The Fringe is Bob Gullotti, drums; John Lockwood, bass; and George Garzone, saxophone.

I was an 18-year-old saxophone student at Berklee College of Music when my new best friend, a trumpeter named Willy Olenick, told me about The Fringe. "You've got to hear this band," he said. "They're an amazing trio. You can hear them any Monday night at Michael's and you're nuts not to go."

Willy didn't mention anything about what style they played, and I didn't ask. I just took his advice and went.

Michael's was a small, narrow bar behind Symphony Hall in Boston. There was a WPA mural on the wall. They only served beer and wine, and let's just say a contingent of a few regulars might have been there just for the Rolling Rocks. (In fact, they may have been there all day for the Rolling Rocks.) A man named Bill was at the front door at night, collecting the $2 cover charge. Michael himself manned the bar.

Frankly, on first hearing The Fringe, I wasn't sure what was happening. The trio took the stage, and I don't think I was even sure when the set started. At some point, I realized that this music was not like the other jazz I had heard. Until that time, my jazz listening had been mostly big bands and straight-ahead, swinging jazz groups.

I'd never really heard so-called avant-garde music before, but I stayed for the set, trying to make sense of the sounds. I remember thinking, "I've got to check this out more. There's something here and I don't understand it." I didn't know why, but I found myself looking forward to the next Monday. And then the next Monday, and the next.

After about a year of Mondays, Michael spoke to me: "You're here every week — why don't you be the bartender?" I thought for two seconds and said, "Sure."

Enlarge Giovanni Russonello/Courtesy of Capitalbop

Mad Curious, with drummer Lenny Robinson, saxophonist Brian Settles and bassist Tarus Mateen, performs at a Capitalbop house show.

Giovanni Russonello/Courtesy of Capitalbop

Mad Curious, with drummer Lenny Robinson, saxophonist Brian Settles and bassist Tarus Mateen, performs at a Capitalbop house show.

The Undead Music Festival, which lifted off last night, has grown every year. On Friday, it will outgrow New York City.

Now in its third year, this jazz festival typically seizes small pockets of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, as it did yesterday, building immersive urban playgrounds where largely young audiences flood venues with colored admissions bracelets. It is jazz as both heady experience and social happening. But on Friday's Night of the Living DIY, the venues scatter across five Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as a half-dozen cities across the U.S.

Still, the festival's expansion — and its use of "do-it-yourself" spaces rather than traditional clubs — is really a way of asking audiences to think smaller, to look closer to home. To turn off (computers and stereos), tune out (from your MP3 collection) and drop in (on a snug, local gathering).

As the head of Capitalbop, an organization that seeks to engage local jazz audiences in Washington, D.C., and presents informal shows in service of that goal, I find this development exciting. Search & Restore, one of the groups responsible for Undead, has decided to feature living-room venues simply because they are already thriving: A quiet movement of artist-produced, anti-corporate jazz concerts is creeping across the country. Here are a few of the motivations that I've perceived for this idea, and for Undead's decision to embrace it.

As a follow-up to yesterday's thoughts around BADBADNOTGOOD, the improvising band that many folks are talking about, I'd like to submit this brief video interview with young pianist Christian Sands.

Sands is a product of the modern jazz education system — he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music, one of the most prestigious jazz programs out there, and studied with both Jason Moran and Dr. Billy Taylor. He got his first big break when he joined Christian McBride's Inside Straight, which brought him on tour around the world. He's currently studying composition with Vijay Iyer — he was literally in the middle of a lesson when All Things Considered interviewed Iyer in March.

As you can see, Sands carries himself with a soft-spoken humility. He also happens to be a very good and very in-demand musician. I met him briefly when he stopped by NPR with Ben Williams' band, and you can hear him on Piano Jazz and playing with the Olatuja Project.

All this would seem to make him the anti-BBNG musician: possesses a music school pedigree, is polite, demonstrates competence in straight-ahead jazz, plays a lot of seated shows in suits, actually looks up to older musicians. But he's but a 23-year-old with a voice that occasionally cracks — merely two years older than BBNG's oldest member. And check out the tune Sands is playing throughout in the background: Kanye West's "Runaway." (It becomes more obvious around 6:21, when you can hear Sands' riff on the signature "repeating single note on beat three" motif.)

Like BBNG's members, who cover Kanye's "Flashing Lights," Sands came of age musically as Kanye West rose to pop culture superstardom. Naturally, Kanye's beats are part of Sands' musical lexicon too. (So is the popular hip-hop duo OutKast, whose song "Prototype" Sands also briefly talks about arranging.) Just because he came up in jazz's mainstream doesn't mean that Sands doesn't think about how his art interfaces with pop culture today. I like to think it's given him more tools to deal with that, actually.

I'd like to point out one more bit of this interview I find revealing:

Enlarge Sean Berrigan

BADBADNOTGOOD.

Sean Berrigan

BADBADNOTGOOD.

Hello, fans of the Toronto band BADBADNOTGOOD. Thanks for stopping by, truly. I'm delighted that somebody turned you on to the joys of improvised instrumental music; as you can see, it's an experience like none other.

The three young band members — "No one above the age of 21 was involved in the making of this album," their new mixtape claims — create music that could theoretically be called "jazz," but you probably heard about them from a friend or media outlet for whom jazz isn't a top priority. (In fact, the consensus among professional jazz musicians and journalists seems to be notably against them, and further remarks still trickle in.) Their repertoire merges jazz training with their musical milieu: covers of songs by au courant musicians, extrapolations upon hip-hop beats and a few original compositions too.

BBNG is currently on a short U.S. tour, including a New York City stop and a gig backing singer Frank Ocean at Coachella. That's led to another wave of press about the band's connection to the music of today. Being a jazz journalist, I'd like to point out that this connection essentially describes the entire history of jazz: Musicians have always adapted pop music of the age to their own ends. So if you're into what BBNG is doing, here are five other bands who think similarly, but aren't as well-known outside the jazz world. For the sake of simplicity, I've picked only trios of keyboards, bass and drums — just like BADBADNOTGOOD itself.

From the first downbeat of the first Center City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, you could hear history in the air — and maybe history being made.

The Wade Dean Enspiration, a gutsy young quintet, led off the festival with "Gingerbread Boy" by Jimmy Heath, one of Philly's many homegrown jazz legends. It was 1 p.m. last Saturday, and the dim carpeted room upstairs at Fergie's Pub was starting to fill up.

For the next six hours, Dean, a saxophonist, and his fellow bandleaders would strive not only to honor the legacy embodied by Heath and others, but also to bring forward their own art, a music of today. There was a larger goal as well: to revive a year-round jazz presence in Philadelphia, where the jazz club scene has all but collapsed.

The Center City Jazz Festival is the brainchild of trombonist Ernest Stuart, 28. Buoyed by a Kickstarter campaign, which exceeded its goal of $16,000, Stuart took a cue from New York's Undead and Winter Jazzfests. On Saturday afternoon, he booked 16 bands at four venues within short walking distance.

Of these, Chris's Jazz Café and Time Restaurant book jazz regularly. Fergie's, an old-school Irish bar, and Milkboy, a coffee shop and rock venue, do not. But for one day — possibly the most significant day for Philly jazz in years — these establishments came together for a grassroots showcase of one of the city's greatest cultural assets.

"I'm so proud of my good friend Ernest," said drummer Justin Faulkner as the day ended. "This festival was what we needed to lift our spirits."

Wade Dean concurred: "He did a damn good job. Ernest came through."

Enlarge Rick Diamond/Getty Images

A new profile of Blue Note Records head Don Was, pictured here at the 2009 BMI Country Awards, reveals some interesting signings.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

A new profile of Blue Note Records head Don Was, pictured here at the 2009 BMI Country Awards, reveals some interesting signings.

More from this week:

• International Jazz Day concert videos are up. JazzTimes had a writeup. So did Jazz Beyond Jazz.
• Cecil Taylor in The New York Times. Ben Ratliff sits down with the great pianist for "five hours over two days," and then some with his artistic progeny. There's also a series of Taylor solo and tribute performances coming up soon in New York.
• Don Was, new head of Blue Note Records, is profiled by Nate Chinen in the Times. Public revelations: The label has signed Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, Derrick Hodge, Jose James, Aaron Neville, Van Morrison. New Ravi Coltrane, Lionel Loueke and Joe Lovano records are in the works.
• An alternate list of 50 great jazz albums, from Phil Freeman. New, old, both.
• Cuban pianist Omar Sosa is coming "home" to the San Francisco Bay Area for a gig. Here's a look at how musicians meet musicians and make themselves feel at "home."
• Dan Morgenstern, eminent jazz critic/historian, speaks with WBGO after retiring from the Institute of Jazz Studies. Also: For a look at some throwbacks, check out "This week in JazzSet history."
• Three Monk Competition winners, all vocalists, talk about the effect of the award on their careers. This story is actually written by a jazz vocalist for the Washington Post.
• A new documentary film paints a portrait of jazz in Washington, D.C. right now. A trailer is up.
• Neneh Cherry (daughter of Don Cherry) and The Thing (Scandinavian free-jazz trio) cover rapper MF Doom. Wild, no?
• Lessons for all teachers, from jazz-band instructors.
• JazzWax spoke with composer-arranger Van Alexander.
• The Jazz Session spoke with guitarist Anders Nilsson and pianist Dan Cray.
• The Checkout replayed this gig.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Enlarge Beti Niemeyer

Legendary bassist Ron Carter turns 75 today.

Beti Niemeyer

Legendary bassist Ron Carter turns 75 today.

Today is the 75th birthday of Ron Carter, one of the most influential and widely recorded bassists in jazz history. With appearances on more than 2,000 records, his career has spanned the past six decades and is still going strong today.

Carter achieved international attention as a member of Miles Davis' legendary "second great quintet" during the mid- to late 1960s. With nimble and accurate technique, his clear lines always kept the pulse steadily moving and synchronized perfectly with everyone on stage. This reliability landed him sideman gigs with countless other musicians: McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver, just to name a few legends.

Carter's soloing ability is not to be ignored, of course, and he has made his mark as a bandleader since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the biggest legacy he leaves today for younger generations of bass players can be summed up in an anecdote that I've heard from him, via D.C.-area bassist Herman Burney: A $100 bill slipped under the strings of an upright bass stays under the upper section of the neck (the instrument's lower pitch range), but falls if placed farther down the neck (in the higher pitch range). It's symbolic — bassists make the bulk of their money by supporting groups, not by taking solos in the higher register.

Five recordings are not enough to fully reflect the entirety of a career spanning more than half a century, but the following selections provide an adequate sample.