This article is part of our coverage of the Montreux Jazz Residency 2024. At this year's Residency, a panel of journalists will discuss the role of jazz in the media. Ahead of what will certainly be a stimulating debate, this article sums up some of my own thoughts on the topic.

For more information, visit the Montreux Jazz Festival website. For a deeper dive, read our in-depth look at the concept behind the Montreux Jazz Residency.



Jazz journalism began with a big bang: In 1939, the first publication dedicated exclusively to jazz was happy to report that it had gone from a print run of "a few hundred five years ago to more than 80,000 copies a month." So eager were their readers, that, after a few tumultuous months, Downbeat Magazine decided to switch to a fortnightly release schedule. Listeners weren't just interested in jazz. They were hungry for it.

The success of Downbeat, which initially looked more like a newspaper than a magazine is not unique. Whenever an exciting new direction in music arrives, it creates, in listeners and editors alike, the desire to write about it.

Over half a century later, techno would take the journey from Detroit to Europe and as clubs were pulsing to it, a tiny fanzine called Frontpage quickly reached a readership of 100,000 in Germany alone. What is remarkable, however, is that Downbeat managed this feat at a time when it had neither cable television nor social media to spread the word and distribution channels were primitive even by mid-90s standards.

All this to say that, at one point, jazz was an inseparable darling of the media. The history of its legendary recordings and performances is mirrored by inspired writing, atmospheric photography and intense discussion about its merits, meaning, and wider implications.

So what went wrong? Why is jazz still under-represented not just in terms of sales but media coverage as well? This questions seems particularly relevant today:

On paper jazz should today have a wider audience than ever before.

Music journalism, after all, has radically diversified. At the time of their publication, Downbeat and Frontpage could build a huge audience by focusing on just a single genre. Generally speaking, well into the 00s, the keyword in media was still “specialisation,” - i.e. catering to a clearly defined target group with a highly limited content spread.

Today, meanwhile, the focus is firmly on “eclecticism.” Pitchfork will, entirely self-evidently, feature the latest jazz and even free-improv releases alongside indie rock, hip-hop, singer-songwriter, and electronic music. And it makes perfect sense for The Line of Best Fit to publish an extensive interview with avantgarde icon Laurie Anderson alongside a feature on pop singer Camila Cabello. The walled gardens of yesteryear have disappeared and given way to wide open fields where snubbery has no place and almost every niche has a home.

It would seem plausible that jazz, as a genre which has traditionally had its finger on the Zeitgeist, should flourish in such an environment. Yet, this is not at all what is happening.

The underlying motivations of the large media conglomerates are undeniably part of the issue. It would be naïve to believe that an equal love for all genres of music is at the root of the diversity on display. Simply, in a market of decreasing financial returns, the most promising strategy is to cast one's net wide and draw in readers from as many camps as possible.

And while it is probably true that most regular visitors to Pitchfork, for example, will be interested in the new Taylor Swift album in some sense simply because of its wider cultural implications, it is unlikely that The Tortured Poets Department makes up a significant chunk of their music consumption.

Poptimism has made it possible for serious publications to write about popular music. But the extraordinary prominence of these articles merely serves the trivial goal of optimising performance. In other words, reading about this music, for the publication's core target audience, is more important than actually listening to it.

Unfortunately, jazz is not a useful tool for media companies to reach their performance goals.

For most major music magazines – if such a thing exists in 2024 – the financial reward of including extreme metal bands like Ulcerate or Blood Incantation or informing readers about the latest from independent jazz labels and artists is negligible. And so their reporting on these scenes will accordingly tend to be sporadic at best.

This is not to say that you won't find any good jazz writing in any of these publications. In fact, jazz has kept up a fairly respectable medial visibility even while its commercial relevance has dwindled. For many quality newspapers and magazines, jazz has remained a core part of their portfolio, as relatively small as it may be in terms of its audience. And there is clearly a strong desire to feature the leaders of the new jazz movement, especially if, as with Shabaka Hutchings or Nubya Garcia, they have something to say beyond the music.

But my impression, at least, is that for the most part, these reviews or articles are mainly there to enrich or “fortify” the still fairly predictable main courses on the menu. Jazz is a spice, a vitamin, a topping to add taste, depth, and layers to something that is, quite often, fairly bland, shallow, and one-dimensional.

The same can, I suppose, be said about other styles of music which fall underneath the mainstream radar. The difference is that a metalhead wouldn't even head over to mainstream music websites in the first place, just like classical music aficionados have their own channels of information.

The economics of electronic music, meanwhile, are largely unaffected by media coverage, as it is driven by the club scene where DJ sets are far more powerful in driving interest and sales than any article, review, or interview – which, coincidentally, explains why journalism in this corner has all but died entirely.

Jazz, however, does not want to be boxed in like that.

Throughout its history, jazz fans have traditionally been extremely open to just about every form of expression, including painting, sculpting, film, photography, literature, and poetry.

This is why Downbeat sold 80,000 copies every two weeks after just five years, despite mainstream listeners looking down on this music. This is why jazz crossed the ocean and found a second home in Europe (and France in particular) with audiences and composers bored by the establishment. This is why musicians, label owners, and concert organisers accepted huge economic and personal risks in promoting a music which outsiders often considered a threat.

Simply put, then, specialisation and withdrawal run counter to jazz's inherent tendency to fuse, experiment, and expand.

As an example, here are Darius Jones's responses to questions music writer Stef Gijssels asked him about some of his current favourites: Madvillain's Madvillainy, Kendrick Lamar, Pierre Henry’s “Variations pour une porte et un soupir,” Toni Morrison.

Or, take Macha Gharibian's memories of her first time in New York, which include not just jazz clubs, and the city's musicians, but also “freedom, Manhattan, the Met, the Moma, Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Brooklyn, and Prospect Park.” It is unlikely that pallates as varied as this could ever be satisfied by a mono diet of jazz alone.

The media couldn't help but fall under the spell of jazz.

For a fascinatingly long time, this was a genre which seemed to be able to just keep up with the times but actually stay ahead of them. It is often forgotten at which breakneck speed jazz developed in its prime.

Between 1940 and 1980, it went through bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, jazz rock, fusion, smooth jazz, and electronic jazz until it was reincarnated in drum n bass and downbeat in the 90s. The incessant forward momentum was what gave the genre its irresistible pull and thrust beyond the confinements of its community and it was also what created a constant communication between the past and the present and kept pulling new listeners in.

You could go from an album like Adam F's Colours to Bob James's Three, from Bitches Brew to Kind of Blue, from Keith Jarrett to Oscar Peterson and from Makaya McCraven to the entire Blue Note catalogue. It is hard to imagine a serious writer who would not consider this an incredibly exciting topic to cover or reflect upon.

Even middle of the road media could not escape its pull. Not in the least because, for almost half a century, jazz had a weatherfrog-like quality for predicting and anticipating the future of music. It was a prophet in uncertain times and this made it possible for the genre to thrive even if, with notable exceptions of course, it didn't cultivate the same kind of superstars on which mainstream styles relied. Looking at jazz meant looking into a crystal ball and even if not all predicted futures would come to pass, it did tickle the imagination.

When Herbie Hancock teamed up with Bill Laswell for “Rockit” in 1983, it sounded like nothing before and very much like the rest of that decade, it wasn't empty speculation but a true sense of where things could be headed. Tapping into the future is part of what draws audiences into cinemas for science fiction movies and it is what made jazz such a fascinating topic to cover in the media.



The thing is:

Once you start aggressively pushing for these visionary moments, you're almost certain to lose the magic.

As time went on, jazz journalism found less and less inspiring tales to tell which, eventually, led to an obsession with the past. Looking back, even as someone who considered drum n bass the most fascinatingly alien thing ever to come out of a sampler, I have to admit that its core was made up by breaks, drum fills, bass lines and guitar licks going back to the earliest days of the genre. In fact, still today, instrumental/lofi hip-hop, house music and many forms of electronic funk rely on jazz tunes recorded half a century ago.

Similarly, the big jazz labels started to treat their back catalogue as the main revenue stream, while audiophile vinyl re-issues of classics sold at the price of ten new records by living artists. In 2024, interested newbies can pick up just about every legendary title from the catalogue at bargain prices – releases which have proven their value over time, which are widely debated and praised – or decide to support the first steps of a young artist.

Although other genres may face similar problems, the notion that jazz is “America's classical music” has worked to its disadvantage here – with hundreds of cheap, formidable legacy versions of the Goldberg Variations out there, why take a risk on a recent one?

To make matters worse, especially in jazz, it can sometimes feel as if the present is still catching up with its past which sends those caught by the virus down a rabbit hole back in time. I have mentioned Herbie Hancock beforein this article, but his oeuvre really lends itself well to exemplify the way that jazz has spun out to the furthest orbits only to come full circle again.

Take an album like Sextant, which still sounds alien today, giving a lot of what is published in the experimental electronica segment a run for its money.



Meanwhile, quite a bit of 80s and 90s jazz saw a return to a warm, comforting kind of nostalgia or a smooth approach to electronics which felt decidedly less futuristic.

This is not a criticism of the music at all. But it does explain why the media have found less and less to talk about when it comes to jazz. In fact, if media coverage is measured by its effectiveness, then some Youtube video channels whose content mainly consists of showing recent used vinyl “hauls” from record store visits have long taken over from magazines.  

So are we approaching the end of the intimate relationship between jazz and the media?

Certainly, the fact that thrilling new jazz is still being played, performed, and recorded today speaks books about the fact that, perhaps, the role of the media in terms of making or breaking music is not the same it used to be. However, I do feel as though great music journalism can still make a difference and that jazz, in particular, can benefit from trying new approaches.

It especially has something to gain from observing the way that metal has managed to stay relevant even though it, too, has long decreased in relevance from the days when death metal CDs sold in excess of 100,000 copies, Metallica's Black Album turned into one of the biggest albums of all time, and Slipknot were featured in mainstream magazines.

On metal websites like Angry Metal Guy, new releases are written about by knowledgeable fans for other knowledgeable fans, and the comment section is a place to exchange opinions and discuss. Metal Archives, on the other hand, is a place for fans to pen their own reviews, some of which are more detailed, insightful, and, frankly, deeper than many “professional” ones. And on channels like Metal Trenches, a masked presenter checks out the best from the crop of albums in real time with viewers.

The keywords here are neither “diversity” nor “specialisation.” Rather, “discovery” is at the heart of these publications, the feeling that the next record, the next gig, the next link you click on could literally change your life forever.

To get back to a similar state of excitement, there needs to be a realisation:

Jazz should not not be “in the media” at all.

The love affair between jazz and the media started in 1939, when Downbeat went from a four-weekly publication schedule to a 14-day one. Likewise, it cooled down considerably when, exactly 60 years later, it reverted to a monthly cycle. Certainly, for the next ten years, other areas of the music industry seemed more fertile and progressive. Still, it was never that the jazz scene no longer offered life-changing opportunities. Instead, it has often seemed to me that perhaps the dilemma is that we are still talking about “jazz in the media.”

The opening lines of Ralph J. Gleason's liner notes to Bitches Brew, replete with missing punctuation and consistent minor case spelling, are a spot on representation of why today's coverage of jazz can often feel stale:

“there's so much to say about this music. i don't mean so much to explain about it because that's stupid, the music speaks for itself. what i mean is that so much flashes through my mind when i hear the tapes of this album that if i could i would write a novel about it full of life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love.”

In a certain sense, this was the real genius of Claude Nobs's idea to start issuing live LPs carrying the name of the Montreux Jazz Festival. It wasn't just a promotion tool to get his festival and the music played there into the media. It wasn't just built on the conviction that this music, improvised and fleeting, deserved to be preserved for posterity. It was a way of creating a medium outside of the media.

Nobs knew that most jazz journalism, paradoxically, took readers away from the music, rather than drawing them closer. Or perhaps, to put it differently, the closer it got, the more its subject dissolved – like a beautiful, yet fragile dream.

In On the Road, Jack Kerrouac created that very narrative that the Bitches Brew liner notes allude to, a novel about life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love. He made us experience jazz, rather than explain it, which is all this music really seems to want. It doesn't seem far-fetched to believe that something similar could be possible again today: An approach by which the music itself become the message again, by which it both embraces and circumvents the media. An approach where the writing and discussion is as connected to the releases and performances as those famous liner notes were.

This also means that we need a different way of writing about this music, a styale that matches its new sounds, its new musicians, and our new ways of experiencing this music. Some of the greatest jazz writing ever was not really “about jazz” so much as it was “jazz as writing.” Gleason was right: We need to capture the flashes that jazz triggers in our mind - anything else would be stupid.