Jazz music and youth

Before the Civil War, as well as after the war and well into the 60s, jazz was a music for young people: they bought records, listened to them, danced to them, discussed this or that musician, this or that style and, as far as their financial capacity allowed, they attended concerts and went to jazz clubs. For about fifty years, this fondness for jazz among young people has been fading away, melting away. You only have to look at the average age of the people who attend the concerts: young people are in a clear minority.

Interestingly and in the opposite direction, during these fifty years of loss of young audiences, the appearance of music schools where jazz is taught has facilitated the appearance of a certain contingent of young musicians, technically very well prepared, that doesn’t correspond with the lack of general interest in jazz manifested among the youth.

The most curious thing about this is that when young people have the opportunity to attend a good jazz concert, either because the musicians performing are young like them, that is to say, peers, or because they have been persuaded and are lucky enough to listen to one of the current masters, their reaction is usually quite enthusiastic.

So why this lack of young audiences for jazz music? We believe there are two main reasons.

The first is the influence of the current environment, basically, that of the media that has so much power in today’s world. In the media, jazz has been niched, almost completely forgotten. One only has to compare it with the boom-boom of rock concerts or television competitions for young people (Euphoria on TV3). And young people, a very impressionable group, with a tendency toward gregariousness, allow themselves to be dragged down by this pressure in order not to fall out of favor with fashion.

The second reason, which to a large extent is at the origin of just this, lies in the fact that much of what is presented as jazz has abandoned the warm, direct, danceable, exciting nature of the style, for a cryptic, boring, intellectually-tinged music, only for specialists, snobs, and those who accept boredom if they can boast of being wise and superior to the rest of humanity. The image that the majority of young people have in relation to what is called “jazz” is this unattractive image that we have just described. So, those of us who believe that jazz is a perfectly suitable and enriching music for young people, we must do everything possible to improve this bad image, promote the attractive side of jazz, and get young musicians to assume the responsibility of conveying this attractive image to their peers. If this came to fruition, maybe the media would pay better attention to jazz and the situation would change.