#1: BOSTON GLOBE: Smooth jazz is here to stay
Posted on 2006-07-22 07:42:10 by slot
Love it or hate it, smooth jazz is here to stay
By Sarah Rodman, BOSTON GLOBE
CALL HIM POP. Call him jazz. Call him, if you must, a smooth operator.
But whatever you do, don't call the music that trumpeter Chris Botti
makes smooth jazz.
"We're not smooth jazz," Botti says, curtly.
Try telling that to the radio programmers who routinely put his cool
compositions and covers into rotation, and the listeners who have
scooped up more than a million copies of his discs, including his most
recent effort, "To Love Again: The Duets."
Botti tries to be understanding. "To about 98 percent of the general
public, if you put an instrument on the top and they can sort of figure
out 'Well, you're playing in a little tiny club and it sounds like a
math test' or 'You're playing bigger venues and it's pleasing,' then
the second one is always going to be smooth jazz," he says. "It doesn't
matter what's going on underneath."
Indeed, a glance at smooth jazz radio playlists reveals a much wider
collection of artists than you might guess. Of course, instrumentalists
such as Botti, saxophonist Dave Koz, and keyboardist Brian Culbertson
are staples. But so are plenty of vocalists and singer-songwriters:
Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, India.Arie, Michael McDonald, Anita
Baker, Alicia Keys, Luther Vandross, and Botti's former employer Sting.
And the fact is, some of those artists - especially those who'd never
be mistaken for jazz musicians - have no problem being adopted by the
smooth jazz community, so long as it gets people listening to their
music. Radio play is radio play, after all.
And yet, regardless of the music's popularity, or how many big-selling
acts now fall under the genre's umbrella, many artists and fans,
especially those who fancy themselves jazz purists, bristle at the very
mention of smooth jazz. Others are simply resigned. George Benson -
the virtuoso guitarist with unimpeachable straight-ahead jazz bona
fides has, over the years, achieved a certain equanimity about the
label. "It's here," the 63-year-old says with a laugh, "and you can't
do nothing about it."
Smooth jazz's background
Music fitting the description of smooth jazz existed long before the
term ever did. Serious jazz musicians such as Benson, Bob James, David
Sanborn, Herb Alpert, and Chuck Mangione played what would now be
labeled smooth jazz as far back as the'70s. And, yes, fans ate it up.
"The music just got more and more popular and so a whole radio format
formed around it and they had to call it something because people like
labels," Culbertson says. "You couldn't call it a traditional jazz
station because it's not. They couldn't call it pop because there's not
a lot of vocals. So it was like, 'Hmmm, the music's kind of smooth
sounding and there's jazz influence - hey, let's put those two words
together.'"
That's exactly what happened, according to Frank Cody, a former radio
consultant who deserves the credit - or the blame, depending on your
viewpoint - for the term "smooth jazz."
"It was actually a listener," Cody concedes. In the early '90s, as a
member of consulting firm Broadcast Architecture, Cody conducted focus
groups. One Chicago woman strung together the infamous words when
grappling for a description of a song snippet. "At that moment," Cody
says, "light bulbs went off over everybody's heads." A format was born.
Around the same time, Billboard instituted its "Contemporary Jazz"
chart to separate popular smooth-jazz artists and harder-edged fusion
groups from straight-ahead, or traditional, jazz artists. The reason?
Smooth jazz sales were beginning to dwarf the traditional stuff. "The
concern was that it would be easy for a smooth jazz artist such as
Chuck Mangione or a Spyro Gyra to outsell traditional artist Dexter
Gordon," says Billboard's director of charts and senior analyst Geoff
Mayfield.
But what is smooth jazz? Ask 10 different people, you'll get 10
different answers.
"It's almost like the Supreme Court justice's definition of
pornography: I know it when I hear it," says Mayfield with a laugh.
The fundamental difference between smooth jazz and traditional jazz
lies in the chief instrumentalist's approach to improvisation.
Typically, at least on record, smooth jazz musicians just don't
improvise. They often prefer to serve as a surrogate voice, "singing"
the melody line over a simple pop or R&B groove. Play Kenny G's
"Songbird" followed by John Coltrane's jazz classic "My Favorite
Things" back to back and you'll get the picture. When it comes to
vocalists, it's the difference between the mellow phrasing and textures
of a Sade or a Norah Jones versus the energetic scatting of, say, Ella
Fitzgerald. As the artists found on smooth jazz playlists make clear,
the "smooth" is usually more important than the "jazz."
"There's a quality to the vocals, a soulfulness to the vocals and an
equal soulfulness to the instrumentals," Koz says. "Whether it's a
vocal song or an instrumental song, it's melody driven and generally
has some sort of rhythmic pulse on the bottom."
However it's described, almost all of the artists now loosely included
in the category would tell you that they didn't set out to make smooth
jazz. They created music from the heart, and the format abducted them.
Which is exactly what smooth jazz programmers have been doing since the
format's inception: gradually adopting artists and songs that dash the
conventional image of smooth jazz as that blissed-out instrumental
tootling you hear during massages or root canals.
So while Kenny G's lyrical yet much maligned "Songbird" may be one of
the most well-known smooth jazz songs ever recorded, appropriated
smooth jazz hits now include pop and R&B songs with vocals such as
Benson's "On Broadway," Sade's "Smooth Operator," and Steely Dan's "Hey
Nineteen."
Convincing listeners that if they like these songs then, by default,
they like smooth jazz is an uphill battle, however. And musicians
usually take one of three approaches: resist, tolerate, or embrace.
"I could say to someone my last two CDs are
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all done basically live with an orchestra and it's way more coming from
Miles Davis and Chet Baker than smooth jazz," says Botti, a resister.
"But all people know is that it's smooth, so it translates into 'makes
them feel relaxed.' " Because of that, listeners don't associate it
with the more complex forms of bebop or fusion. "Most people think Sade
is a badass jazz musician, and I love Sade. But is she a jazz musician?
Heck no. So what do you do?"
Embracing the genre
Koz, meanwhile, embraces the genre. Known as the "ambassador of smooth
jazz," he started a cottage industry to promote it. In addition to
recording a half-dozen successful albums, Koz headlines popular summer
and holiday tours with simpatico artists, co-founded the Rendezvous
Entertainment record label with Cody - home to smooth jazz stars such
as Wayman Tisdale and Kirk Whalum - and hosts a morning radio show
and weekly syndicated program devoted to the music. He's mounting his
second smooth jazz cruise to the Mexican Riviera - on which Botti has
played in the past - this November.
"Maybe about 10 years ago I stopped letting that bother me," Koz says
of dismissals of the genre as "elevator music." "For a lot of jazz
critics, anything that is outside of that traditional box is not good
or not worthy of attention. I recognize where that lives, but the most
important critic to me is the listener."
These days, it seems that the less jazzy an artist is, the more likely
he is to accept his inclusion in the smooth jazz pantheon.
Pop singer Michael McDonald says he was thrilled when smooth jazz
stations starting playing cuts from his two recent collections of
Motown covers.
"It's a wonderful thing," says the former Doobie Brother, who has
toured with Koz and Culbertson. "I mean, anytime that somebody's
playing your music for an audience that's out there it can only be -
I mean, thank God for smooth jazz radio for artists like myself."
British newcomer Corinne Bailey Rae is also grateful that her new
single "Put Your Records On" - acoustic soul in the vein of Erykah
Badu or India.Arie - has already made a splash stateside on the
smooth jazz charts. In her home country, she gets spun on the rock and
soul outposts of the BBC.
"Wherever you go, people seem to hear things differently according to
what culture or place it is," says the 27-year-old chanteuse. "I'm
happy just to get played."
Of course, getting played can mean the difference between selling
records or not. Smooth jazz artists typically outsell traditional
artists, usually because they get more airplay on more stations.
Traditional jazz outlets have shrunk over the years while smooth jazz
outlets have expanded.
"I will say we definitely sell a lot more than straight-ahead jazz,
that is true," says Culbertson with just a touch of gloating. "We're
selling 100,000 or more, they're not even coming close. They're lucky
if they're selling 15,000."
And the fans don't just buy albums, they come out to hear the music
live.
"Straight-ahead jazz is a harder sell," says Fred Taylor, entertainment
director of Sculler's Jazz Club in Cambridge, Mass. "All of the artists
that we presented in the early years of smooth jazz I keep rebooking,
and they are all big sellers," he says of acts such as Foreplay,
Richard Eliot and Koz.
Taylor, known as a hard-core jazz purist himself, says that he tries to
instruct the jazz police to be less elitist about the format since it
helps subsidize the traditional acts that he brings in.
Tinkering with style
Benson, who's at work on an album with fellow smooth jazz star Al
Jarreau, certainly is. In fact, he admits that he tinkered with his
style over the years to make himself more commercially viable.
"There was a time when in the jazz world I didn't have a solid identity
for the jazz masses," he says. "I couldn't fill up the clubs. So I had
to do something that would. ... And when I started getting hit records,
they were records that were oriented on the pop thing and the R&B thing
and I used my jazz experience to enhance those, to give them some
pizazz."
But even when the music has pizazz, as much of it does - especially
live when the instrumentalists engage in more inventive improvisation
- the smooth jazz label itself is still a turn-off to some.
"If we could change the name from smooth jazz to something that had a
little bit more of a hip quality to it that would get the critics off
our back, I think all the artists that have been around for a while
would say let's do it!" Koz says with a laugh. "The problem is that
radio stations have spent millions upon millions of dollars over 18 to
20 years branding themselves as smooth jazz stations, so you can't walk
away from that."
Even Botti grudgingly admits that "ultimately smooth jazz is a radio
format that began with a lot of narrowness and in the last few years
has opened substantially to other kinds of music that embraces jazz."
"Even Slash has a smooth jazz hit called 'Obsession Confession' - so
there," Koz says of the Guns N' Roses guitarist's surprise 1996 hit.
"We are an equal opportunity employer in the smooth jazz community. If
you're Slash and you're wearing that big top hat and you've got a good
song, we'll take you."
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#14: Re: BOSTON GLOBE: Smooth jazz is here to stay
Posted on 2006-07-23 01:25:07 by Tim McNamara
In article <<a href="mailto:1153608760.187945.79990@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com" target="_blank">1153608760.187945.79990@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com</a>>,
"slot" <<a href="mailto:jazzjitsu@yahoo.com" target="_blank">jazzjitsu@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:
> pmfan57 wrote:
> >
> > Couldn't have said it better: Smooth jazz is background music.
>
> I could take you into a number of bars and restaurants that play John
> Coltrane as background music.
"Smooth jazz" really can' tbe anything but background music. Unlike
Coltrane.
> > Half the smooth jazz guys are jazz players, and the other half are
> > rock guys who play mellow. Since there's little need to improvise
> > well, people don't care.
>
> Who is this "people" to whom you refer? Smooth jazz fans? If so, I
> say right on. Who cares about the players' pedigrees so long as they
> make great music.
The music is indeed what counts. Unfortunately the people playing
"smooth jazz" aren't playing great music. IMHO YMMV etc.
> > But it's not a "form of jazz". It's a form of instrumental pop
> > music.
>
> Since you're so concerned with pedigree and history, you must be
> aware that jazz used to be instrumental pop music. Smooth jazz has
> simply returned jazz to its roots.
Smooth jazz = turn of the century New Orleans music? Who knew?
> > Botti is one of those that can play jazz and can improvise. But if
> > he had to compete with the Tom Harrell's and Jon Faddis's, who
> > knows if he could have done so, musically? It's kind of the easy
> > way out. He might have been able to.
>
> What's with the competitionn? It's music, not sports. You play your
> way, I'll play mine, and we're all the better for having a variety of
> styles.
I Agree With Pat Metheny
(copyright Richard Thompson)
<a href="http://www.richardthompson-music.com/audio/I_Agree_With_Pat_Metheny.mp3" target="_blank"> http://www.richardthompson-music.com/audio/I_Agree_With_Pat_ Metheny.mp3</a>
I agree with Pat Metheny
Kenny's talents are too teeny
He deserves the crap he's going to get
'Overdubbed himself on Louis
What a musical chop suey
Raised his head above the parapet
Now Louis Armstrong was the king
He practically invented swing
Hero of the twentieth century
'Did duets with many a fella
"Fatha" Hines, Bing, Hoagy, Ella
Strange he never thought of Kenny G
A meeting of great minds, how nice
Like Einstein and Sporty Spice
Digitally fused in an abortion
Oh, Kenny fans will doubtless rave
While Satchmo turns inside his grave
Soprano man's bit off more than his portion
Brainless pentatonic riffs
Display our Kenny's arcane gifts
But we don't care, his charms are so beguiling
He does play sharp, but let's be fair
He has such lovely crinkly hair
We hardly notice, we're too busy smiling
How does he hold those notes so long?
He must be a genius. Wrong!
He just has the mindlessness to do it
He makes Britney sound like scat
If this is jazz I'll eat my hat
An idle threat, I'll never have to chew it
So next time you're in a rendezvous
And Kenny's sound comes wafting through
Don't just wince, eliminate the cause
Rip the tape right off the muzak
Pull the plug, or steal a fuse, Jack
The whole room will drown you in applause
Yes, Kenny G has gone too far
The gloves are off, it's time to spar
Grab your hunting rifle, strap your colt on
It's open season on our Ken
Yet I await the moment when
We lay off him and start on Michael Bolton
Oh, I agree with Pat Metheny
Kenny's talents are too teeny
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