Why most people don't like jazz

So, to summarize in an only very slightly trollish way:

- The problem with jazz is the people who listen to it.

- Music isn't art, or at least it's wrong to appreciate it as such.

- Jazz ought to be revivalist, not innovative.

Suffice to say, I don't think I can agree...

No way - operatic singing techniques are fundamentally different from other kinds of singing, and much harder work physically. Next time in you're in the shower or wherever you can sing, do a chorus of some song you like. Then take a deep breath and instead of using your throat as you do when you talk, use your abdominal muscles to push the air out of your lungs while you sing, such that you can feel the notes resonating your chest cavity. It isn't just louder, it fundamentally changes the characteristics of your voice.

Part of what makes popular music so compelling is that using microphones to amplify the voice allows singers to present a much more intimate quality - they're right there with you, and that intimacy is strongly coupled to the emotional content of the song, even if it's coming through a stadium-sized sound system. It's like the amplification creates a bridge between the singer and the audience. but in opera, (even with amplification) the singer is bridge between the melody and the audience...a big reason why opera singers don't always look right for the part, but when they open their mouths, it ceases to matter...if they're good enough.

I like the opera a lot and go several times a year...but don't get me started on all the things that are wrong with the opera industry. As with nerdy and self-indulgent jazz, the arts establishment is fucked and limits its own audience by wasting huge amounts of money on packaging the product so it becomes a high-priced status symbol - perhaps even deliberately. Every year in San Francisco they do one or two free operas at the baseball park (via simulcast from the opera house), and people love it - last time it attracted over 35,000 people. But if you want to go the Opera house you'll probably have to pay $75-1000 per ticket to subsidize a small army of union stagehands and visual designers, and they send out glossy-full color begging letters every 6 weeks as if people went to the opera to look at the costumes and stage furniture. Well, I guess some of them do, but I imagine that composers and singers would rather be appreciated for their musical ability than their ability to look like they stepped out of a history book.

Why in the world would someone spend 6-8 hours listening to a piece of music they dislike just so they can like it? If I already have thousands of pieces of music I enjoy listening to, why should I put any effort into liking even more music?

I don't buy the article's conclusion that people should listen to jazz because otherwise they are "missing a huge chunk of what life has to offer". Everyone is missing out on a huge chunk of what life has to offer! Time spent gaining appreciation for music is not spent doing something else. Who is anyone to tell anyone else what chunks of life they should be exploring?

I have an alternate theory for why Americans don't like jazz. They don't like jazz because they don't hear a lot of jazz. They do like lyrical forms of music because they are exposed to a lot of it in the course of their daily lives. Why is a purposefully acquired taste superior to one that didn't require effort?

Take the chairs away.

Seriously. Seating is a scam to collect economic rents on artificially-induced scarcity. Chairs are for sitting and maintaining social ordering, and most people are respectful of that, and by implication of each other. And they are optimal for some kinds of performance. but standing is more equitable and allows people to literally vote with their feet. I have been falling-down tired waiting for a concert to begin, only to forget myself when the artist goes to work - which is why I bought the ticket in the first place.

The fact that two largest ticket companies are now merging into one with a virtual monopoly on the live entertainment industry is a bad, bad thing.

I know, this is bit tough on the disabled who are unable to stand for a long time or at all, but there are ways to work around that.

There's an equilibrium process here. People don't like jazz because it violates their expectations. It violates their expectations because jazz musicians aren't pandering to the tastes of the listening public. Jazz musicians don't pander to the listening public because, since everyone knows that people don't like jazz, no one becomes a jazz musician because they want to become ridiculously rich or famous -- the people who are willing to change their musical style in order to become popular (as versus to satisfy some purely internal intellectual or aesthetic desire) all go to rock, hip-hop or pop.

The flip side of this is that people who listen to especially unpopular subgenres of jazz (particular -bop) seem to enjoy thinking of themselves as "higher educated" or having more sophisticated tastes than others, or just listening to music that isn't* like everything else and isn't driven by short term fads. And jazz musicians seem largely happy to facilitate this, and in turn get to indulge in a creative process that's solely centered around their own creative interests.

Bottom line, jazz won't "go back to the people", because the people don't want it, because the musicians don't want it ... except the ones that do. I think in recent years a whole lot of people have listened to Michael Buble, or Nouvelle Vague.