May 28th, 2008
Another One Bites the Dust
It’s been a bad, bad year for smooth jazz fans.
The Baltimore Sun reports that local smooth-jazz radio station WSMJ suddenly dropped the format last week in favor of the more demographically friendly “rock alternative” and a morning shock jock. In recent months, smooth jazz stations have folded in New York, Washington DC, Houston and Denver. They’re dropping like flies.
I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, smooth jazz is… um… hm. “Abomination” is too strong a word. Let me consult my thesaurus… “atrocity"… “disgrace"… “horror"… “obscenity"… “outrage"… “evil"… “crime"… “monstrosity"… “anathema"… “bane"… Ooh! Good!
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, smooth jazz is the bane of many “real” jazz fans and practitioners, a form of pop music with a dollop of jazz flavoring that—thanks to clever marketing—millions of undereducated people have come to mistake with the music we love. Jazz is to smooth as black coffee is to a sugar-free decaf low-fat latte with a caramel shot. Sorry, but that ain’t coffee. Meanwhile, the players of smooth jazz sell millions of CDs and grow rich, while the best players in straightahead jazz (never mind the avant-garde) sell maybe a few thousand, and often remain obscure even to dedicated listeners. So I’m not going to shed many tears for these big-wattage, smooth-spewing radio stations, while real jazz radio languishes with inadequate funding and 500-watt transmitters at the far left of the FM dial.
But on the other hand, what about the fans? Why shouldn’t people go ahead and drink that sugar-free decaf low-fat latte if that’s what they like? And why shouldn’t they be able to listen to Michael Bublé and Kenny G if those are the sounds they dig? There’s no denying this stuff is popular. One could also argue that there’s a small but significant halo effect, where someone listening to smooth radio might hear a stray Miles Davis or Chick Corea track and be moved to explore.
It’s also hard to say whether the loss of smooth jazz is an opportunity for regular jazz radio or a harbinger of doom. After all, if smooth jazz can’t make it in these big markets without getting squirreled away onto some HD-Radio rider channel (as in Baltimore), what chance do Coltrane, Joe Lovano and Nick Payton have? My guess is that it won’t affect real jazz radio stations much one way or the other. The format names may be similar, but the audiences and expectations are completely different.
Which brings me back to the whole notion of “live and let live”. I may not care when a smooth jazz station dies, but I saw the frustration my wife went through when the only country station in San Francisco changed formats, becoming indistinguishable from half a dozen other rock outlets. It was just stupid. Why abandon a loyal audience and exclusive ownership of a whole genre to duke it out with all those other stations, which already had their own audiences? I imagine smooth fans are asking themselves the same thing now.
In the end, San Francisco got another country station. I’m sure smooth jazz will come back too (assuming terrestrial radio doesn’t curl up and die anytime soon), maybe on smaller stations, probably with a slightly different mix of artists, and perhaps—one can only hope—with a new name.
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Previous Comments...
As the wife of a jazz god (my term, not his), I must also state that in addition to country music I also love jazz. Not to the degree that Husband does, but I do. Partly because of him. Not in the whole “if I pretend to like his music he’ll ask me out” way but in the “listening to someone who understands music and can tell me what to listen for so I’ll appreciate it more” way.
I intend to return the favor when he takes this Classicist/Art Historian on the Grand Tour.
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