{"id":5787,"date":"2023-07-06T07:49:28","date_gmt":"2023-07-06T14:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5787"},"modified":"2023-07-06T07:50:26","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T14:50:26","slug":"new-yorker-the-rise-and-fall-of-smooth-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5787","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: the rise and fall of smooth jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/smooth-jazz-cd1019-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5790\"\/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>Whenever I\u2019m asked to provide a \u201cfun fact\u201d about myself, I usually say that I worked as a smooth-jazz radio announcer back in college. It wasn\u2019t the kind of unsuitable, faintly ironic part-time job one falls into as a student but, rather, the culmination of years of serious and directed effort. In fact, I\u2019d been seeking professional entry into the world of smooth jazz since adolescence: as a high schooler in the suburbs of Seattle, I made weekly rounds through the used-CD shops of University Way to build my personal library of artists from the smooth-jazz world; I frequented Dimitriou\u2019s Jazz Alley, where practically all of those artists played, as a young Gen X-er might have hung out at punk clubs; I even persuaded the local smooth-jazz radio station to take me on as an intern. For all that, I\u2019d never have claimed to like smooth jazz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI hate \u2018classical music,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Alex Ross <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2004\/02\/16\/listen-to-this\">once wrote<\/a> in this magazine\u2014\u201cnot the thing but the name.\u201d I could say the same about \u201csmooth jazz,\u201d which I\u2019ve always considered primarily a marketing term, the label not of a musical genre but of a commercial radio format. In Penny Lane\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/the-front-row\/listening-to-kenny-g-is-an-ironic-masterpiece\">Listening to Kenny G<\/a>,\u201d a 2021 documentary about the saxophonist whose music\u2014even more melodic and hooky than than those of his pop-jazz predecessors, such as George Benson and Grover Washington, Jr.\u2014defined that format, the industry consultant Allen Kepler recalls how that label came about. Conducting focus groups with the market-research firm Broadcast Architecture in the late nineteen-eighties, Kepler asked participants to describe music like Kenny G\u2019s however they liked. One woman, Kepler says, had the perfect answer: \u201cShe\u2019s thinking. She says, \u2018It\u2019s jazz.\u2019 She says, \u2018It\u2019s <em>smooth<\/em> jazz.\u2019 It was almost like it just came to her like a lighting bolt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/the-rise-and-fall-of-smooth-jazz\">at the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I\u2019m asked to provide a \u201cfun fact\u201d about myself, I usually say that I worked as a smooth-jazz radio announcer back in college. It wasn\u2019t the kind of unsuitable, faintly ironic part-time job one falls into as a student but, rather, the culmination of years of serious and directed effort. In fact, I\u2019d been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5792,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5787\/revisions\/5792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}