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Bret Primack, jazz journalist and founder of Jazz Central Station in 1995, is called the Jazz Video Guy on his YouTube channel. He's made a provocative video (below) that asks the question, "Are Some Jazz Writers Republicans?"

In the video, he primarily focuses on Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal column, "Can Jazz Be Saved?," where journalist Teachout claims:

In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be "a rare and valuable national treasure." Nowadays the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at prestigious venues such as New York's Lincoln Center, which even runs its own nightclub, Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.

Here's the catch: Nobody's listening.

Indeed, the title of Teachout's column is almost as provocative as Primack's. But is jazz really dying? Does it need to be saved? Teachout claim, though, is not his own - it comes from an NEA poll from last summer:

The bad news came from the National Endowment for the Arts' latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the fourth to be conducted by the NEA (in participation with the U.S. Census Bureau) since 1982. These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up and take notice:

* In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.

* Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it's growing older -- fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.

* Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That's a 30% drop in attendance.

* Even among college-educated adults, the audience for live jazz has shrunk significantly, to 14.9% in 2008 from 19.4% in 1982.

It seems like the Jazz Video Guy is attacking the messenger, not the facts. The purpose of Teachout's column was to simply point out the statistics, the most revealing one being "that the median age of the jazz audience is now comparable to the ages for attendees of live performances of classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs. 43 in 1982), non-musical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982). In 1982, by contrast, jazz fans were much younger than their high-culture counterparts."

Although the Wall Street Journal's editorial page is one of the most conservative in the land, their actual reporting is one of the best - and non-partisan - around. Just because Teachout's column appears in the WSJ does not make him conservative, and to bring politics into this seems a little silly. The central tenant of Teachout's column was this:

Jazz has changed greatly since the '30s, when Louis Armstrong, one of the ­supreme musical geniuses of the 20th century, was also a pop star, a gravel-voiced crooner who made movies with Bing Crosby and Mae West and whose records sold by the truckload to fans who knew nothing about jazz except that Satchmo played and sang it. As late as the early '50s, jazz was still for the most part a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. But by the '60s, it had evolved into a challenging concert music whose complexities repelled many of the same youngsters who were falling hard for rock and soul. Yes, John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" sold very well for a jazz album in 1965 -- but most kids preferred "California Girls" and "The Tracks of My Tears," and still do now that they have kids of their own.

It's a fact that jazz used to be America's popular music and now it is not. Over the past 50 years, it has slowly evolved into "high-art," at least in the minds of the masses:

It is precisely because jazz is now widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its makers must start to grapple with the same problems of presentation, marketing and audience development as do symphony orchestras, drama companies and art museums --a task that will be made all the more daunting by the fact that jazz is made for the most part by individuals, not established institutions with deep pockets.

So, it's one thing to attack one's musical tastes as conservative, but quite another to drag politics into America's true art form. It's certainly valid to discuss the direction of jazz and whether we need to do more to develop it's audience, but the fact that the average listener to this music has increased in age from 29 to 46 since 1982 speaks volumes.

Although provocative in its title, the Jazz Video Guy would better serve the jazz community by addressing the pressing problem of the shrinking jazz community rather than alienating listeners with "politics on the bandstand," so to speak.

Besides, there are plenty of (rich) jazz-loving Republicans out there who's help we need in the effort to bring jazz back into the mainstream. Let's help bring them on board, shall we?

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