Earl Hines and the Future of Jazz

Years of scavenging through the bins at third-tier record stores in New York and Chicago have left my shelves full of some pretty unusual items. These aren't rare in the sense a collector would mean, but just somewhat odd and unexpected-radio transcriptions of Charlie Parker with Lennie Tristano, for instance, or Bernard Malamud reading "The Mourners."

Some of my favorites, though, are Earl Hines records no one listens to anymore. After recording arguably the greatest sessions ever with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, recruiting Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker for the first bop orchestra in the 1940s and generally doing as much as anyone to lay the foundations of modern jazz, Hines, born in 1903, might have rested on his laurels. Instead, he recorded always vital and often brilliant music into the late 1970s, cutting everything from straight moldy-fig stuff with Muggsy Spanier to what was essentially free jazz.

Hines has one of the all-time catalogues; in terms of scale, he may well be the piano's heavyweight champion. On my shelves, a random selection of Hines finds a four-hands session with Mingus pianist Jaki Byard, a solo tribute to W.C. Handy, an album with Paul Gonsalves and a five-record box set of Ellington interpretations (distributed through the Book of the Month Club)-all recorded when Hines was past retirement age.

A quick poke through the hardly exhaustive Hines discography at AllMusic.com proves the point. Hines recorded 12 albums in 1965, five apiece in 1970 and 1971 and eight in 1974. With that kind of volume, you certainly get more versions of "Sophisticated Lady" than you might need-but you also get Hines vs. Byard, or Hines arranging West Side Story for solo piano. Hines is an extreme case, but not a genuinely exceptional one. It makes for a pretty sad contrast to record companies' meager offerings from today's jazzmen. Hines recorded more records as a leader or solo artist in 1965 than, say, the reasonably prolific Don Byron has in his career, and he had proportionally more opportunities to experiment, to fail and to succeed.

What's odd about this, even granting that jazz was more commercially viable in the 1960s and 1970s, is that Byron and his peers live in an age when, as they say, the barriers to entry have dropped dramatically. Relatively speaking, high-quality recording is as cheap today as it has ever been, and it costs almost nothing to press and distribute a CD. Fantasists have been going on for decades about a time when creative types would be liberated from the tyrannies of the marketplace by technology, freed to experiment, fail and succeed by the untethering of commerce from art that various digital gadgets would allow.

Now that it has arrived, the truth is depressing. Jason Lindner, just the sort of talented young leader you'd hope to see recording as much as possible so as to work through his ideas and arrive at a mature voice, has only recorded three albums this decade-the same number as the brilliant, acclaimed and successful Byron. The wonderful Eric Alexander, as disciplined and, in the best sense, workmanlike a player as you'll find, has been recording at least an album every year since 1992, and his 16 records are still just a couple more than the solid journeyman Hank Mobley recorded in 1956 and 1957. If the present pattern holds, it would be a great surprise were the Lindner catalogue to ever feature a five-record set devoted to interpretations of Bud Powell, or for Alexander to ever record My Fair Lady just to see if it works. (In both cases, I'll hold out hope.)

The problem here is not just that there's less good music for everyone to listen to, or that musicians are being denied the sort of chances previous generations had to throw ideas against the wall and see what sticks, thus losing an important way of developing their craft-these are merely consequences of the real problem, which is that jazz labels are stuck in a ridiculous business model that's designed to move large quantities of (mainly rock) product. As that model is undermined by technology that is making it increasingly less profitable to sell overpriced stuff at Tower Records, the consequences for jazz are going to be dire unless people develop some common sense, and in a hurry.

Pricing records at around $20 and looking to sell them to everyone who might potentially be interested in them-which means, by extension, not flooding the market by putting out six $20 records a year-is how most record labels make money under the industry's current set-up. The idea is that you need to swing for the fences and accept the strikeouts. It's whacky logic in any circumstances, much more so in a genre where, with a few truly awful exceptions (heard Chris Botti lately?), no one's getting the ball out of the infield.

Without being a utopian futurist-no, I don't think Don Byron should be expected to figure out how to make a living by "podcasting" or otherwise getting away from creating solid, tangible objects to sell-it's still quite evident that everyone would be better off with a reversion to the model that led to profit and artistic esteem for Hines and hundreds of others. Record a lot of albums cheaply, and sell them cheaply. Stop focusing on how to get a few people to buy something fairly expensive every year or two, and start focusing on how to get them to buy something cheap a few times a year. If this model quite naturally leads to a lot more boutique labels run by musicians and a lot fewer monolithic labels clumsily bumbling along, staunching the flow of what should be dozens and hundreds of records from our most interesting musicians, I don't think anyone would mind a bit.