I sometimes hear from jazz fans who love the music, but hate the name.
Their reasons are varied, and often based on incorrect information—no, jazz did not originate as a term for sex, despite what you may have heard—but their anxiety is no joke. Sooner of later, they come up with a exciting new idea, namely to rebrand ‘jazz’ with a better identity.
I’m highly skeptical of such plans, and have written elsewhere about my own painful but illuminating experiences with rebranding. My (perhaps cynical) take is that the urgency to find a new name is, in every instance, a substitute for addressing some other, deeper issue.
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Go ahead and give Godzilla a new name. But if he keeps on destroying Tokyo, that image remake won’t last.
It’s not just jazz. A few days ago, a journalist sent me an email with one question—would I comment on the obvious need for a new name for rock music. I was dumbfounded. Was this a thing? But then I realized that fringe masterminds in every genre, from classical to country to Gregorian chant, probably believe that a new name will bring in millions of additional fans.
After mulling it over, all I could say was that the rock debate seemed pointless. Journalists can write whatever they want, but rock and roll will never die—at least as a name for a genre.
But more to the point, these agonized attempts to rebrand a music genre aren’t a new idea. People have been hatching plans to rename jazz for more than 70 years.
A recent rebranding proposal aims to rename jazz as BAM (or Black American Music). I’m a little hazy at how this would actually be put into practice. Aren’t there other genres with equally valid claims—or perhaps even better ones—to the status of Black American Music, whether we’re talking soul, blues, hip-hop, spirituals, R&B, or a host of other significant idioms. Shouldn’t jazz at least share the BAM label with other styles?
But even more confusing is how current-day jazz releases from Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. fit into this scheme. The Nordic jazz of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek is obviously jazz, but can it really be called Black American Music? Or what about the rest of those globe-spanning ECM albums, or how about those London jazz bands with deep African and Indian roots, but not much of an American pedigree? Or what about the booming jazz scenes in Japan or Johannesburg or Jakarta or wherever—how BAM-ish are they?
As far as I can see, the existing word jazz does a better job of fostering this diversity than the narrower BAM label. But given my low level of interest in any rebranding exercise, I should probably let others debate these points.
In an odd way, the BAM advocates remind me of Stan Kenton, who led one of the most influential modern jazz big bands from the 1940s through the 1970s , but clearly hated the terms modern jazz or bebop. Instead he kept coming up with alternatives. In some instances, he called himself a practitioner of Neophonic Music or Progressive Jazz or—most cumbersome of all—New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm (no, not quite NARC, which would have been amusing, but close to it). These endeavors might have generated a few write-ups in the press—and all publicity is good publicity, or so I’m told—but they never stuck.
Nor will any of the other alternatives, I’m convinced. They make for good marketing copy and interview fodder, but not much more.
The most intriguing of these efforts is one tha
