A Shadow of Its Former Self

No jazz fan, however casual, either in the US or abroad, is completely unfamiliar with Downbeat. Along with the long-defunct Metronome, it had once been the most influential jazz magazine in the world. Winning a Downbeat poll meant almost guaranteed success for a musician and frequently a major record deal. A four- or five-star review promised good sales for a record. Today, it is merely the oldest continuously-running jazz magazine, a sort of eminence grise of jazz publications. It’s not that Downbeat had become less influential, it is just that there is a lot less to influence these days. The jazz audience continues to shrink. The jazz revival of the 1990s is looking to have been relatively short-term, undermined partially by the current chaos in the recording industry, partially by its own partisanship, and partially by the general sad state of affairs in the world of music and cultural education. Not a happy time for a jazz magazine, especially one with such a claim of authority as Downbeat.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that Chicago-based Downbeat survives to this day. The editorial staff has clearly managed to avoid the pitfalls of the status quo and evolved with the times and the changing nature of the jazz scene. The results, unfortunately, are mixed, and for each individual reader they will depend largely on his or her interests, perspective and role in the world of jazz. Once primarily a magazine for fans of the music, today’s Downbeat is obviously geared towards musicians, specifically those who are formally studying jazz in college or are planning to do so. Sure, each issue contains a fair share of material one would expect to see in any music magazine – artist profiles, interviews with musicians or record-company A&R people, mentions of remarkable concerts and introductions of promising new talent to watch. In all of these, the editors are to be commended for giving their publication a global perspective, but this is hardly surprising given how much significant jazz happens outside of the US these days. Anyone doing anything less would be setting themselves up for failure.

A growing presence in the magazine in recent years, however, is music education. It started out with the annual “Where to Study Jazz” feature which listed jazz programs around the world with brief descriptions, along with a brief “Woodshed” column in the back of the magazine which transcribed one important solo each month and annotated it. This eventually gave rise to the “Tool Shed” spin-off column which reviews a handful of musical instruments each month. Strangely, the prices of the instruments reviewed are almost never listed, and the quality of the writing varies, making the whole undertaking seem more like a half-hearted attempt to appeal to readers who otherwise would bypass the magazine on the newsstand than an honest effort to cover the topic.

More significantly, however, the music and the musicians discussed in the pages of Downbeat have changed noticeably over the years. Once populated by artists who most listeners would intuitively peg as jazz, the magazine has started to feature more and more “jam bands” and representatives of various other genres which, while maintaining a core of improvisation to a greater or lesser degree, are usually regarded as their own entities or representatives of other styles. Phish, Soulive and Medeski, Martin & Wood have all made the cover in recent years. Not that these artists don’t deserve coverage, but historically their music, though technically accomplished, has not been as inspired or inspiring as the best even current jazz can offer. The trend is clear -- Downbeat’s readership, although generally aware of jazz’s seminal role in the larger world of improvised music, is usually content to remain at the level of craft instead of taking their playing and listening to the realm of art. How each individual reader will feel about this will depend, as I said, on perspective. The moldy figs will cry “sellout” until they are blue in the face. The twenty-something jammers convinced that their music is the only natural evolution of jazz will lap it up. For those of us between the two extremes, the situation is less clear.

To be fair, some sections continue to satisfy issue after issue. The foremost among them are the record reviews. Each issue features well over two dozen reviews, plus a handful of one-paragraph capsule reviews. The few big names left in jazz criticism – Gary Giddins, Nat Hentoff – write for other publications now, but the critics that Downbeat does retain, with the exception of the unreadable Glenn Astarita, tend to know how to listen and write. Even here, however, the recent shift in focus is evident. More and more crossover albums show up in each issue, and even those that might otherwise be of interest to a casual fan can sometimes be by obscure artists with virtually no distribution, making it difficult to hear samples or even find a copy to buy assuming you are willing to do it blindly. Sure, the music may be great, but how useful is the review if the recording is inaccessible? Over the last year or so, the magazine began to list Web addresses for the record companies that issue the reviewed recordings, but that still doesn’t help if they don’t offer sound samples and you are not willing to buy the CD without hearing something from it first.

In the final analysis, Downbeat is still a force to be reckoned with in jazz journalism and criticism, but given its recent shift in focus, to say nothing of its high subscription rates (US $30/year), I can recommend it only with reservations. Consider your situation and interests before deciding that subscribing to Downbeat would be a worthwhile undertaking.