90.3 WCPN ideastream®: Jazz Tracks

Jazz Tracks

Jazz music is not quite a century old, yet it has stirred up more passion and controversy than any other single invention in the twentieth century. Just about everyone you talk to will react to jazz in a different way. Some people happily embrace the music. Others think you need to be a rocket scientist to understand it. It's very much like the debate between people who prefer checkers to chess. Whatever side of the fence you stand on, understand that jazz is more than just music. It's an attitude. It's a lifestyle choice. It's also a very large subculture of Americana. So you might ask yourself, what might we do on a show such as Jazz Tracks?

We show how jazz music has influenced our sense of fashion, our speech, and how it has, in some way, touched just about everything that makes up of our contemporary lifestyle. We share the sounds of jazz both old and new. We talk with musicians, scholars and people on the street about events happening in and outside of our community. We speak to how the music connects with issues that, on the surface, seem to have no jazz attachment at all. We sample from the world of poetry and literature to tell stories that connect each of us. We surf the web and look at latest technological discoveries that impact our lives. We bring the world to you through the prism of jazz in ways that allow you to discover how the music might fit into your everyday reality.

The very word, "jazz," means so many different things in our culture. Of course it describes a style of music; a style that has continually redefined itself from decade to decade. It's affected other kinds of music that we embrace daily, whether it be rock, hip-hop, pop, country or symphonic music. It's even been described as "America's classical music."

The term "jazzy" might describe a person who exhibits a special flair in his dress, speech or persona. "All that jazz" is a phrase we all have used at one time or another to describe miscellaneous odds and ends. We're constantly bombarded with jazz in commercials, and jazz masters such as Duke Ellington are honored on postage stamps. We experience the music on street sidewalks and in the finest concert halls. With all this "jazz" about jazz, the music only constitutes about two percent of the total sales of recordings in our country, and there are currently only a couple commercial jazz radio stations in the United States. Despite these low numbers in commercial settings, it remains the most dominant subculture of our contemporary world.