The old distinctions among art, pop and outright schlock don’t matter to some fans. But they matter to record companies, for a simple reason: crossover sells, the pure product doesn’t. These are tough times for art music, both classical and jazz, once called “America’s classical music”–a sobriquet that sounds more and more like an epitaph. (The jazz world’s equivalent of Classical Crossover is the Smooth Jazz of such musicians as saxophonist Kenny G.) Last year traditional classical-music sales dropped 12 percent. Jazz sales were up slightly, but only because the pop-ish singer Norah Jones is classified on the charts as a jazz artist, largely because she records on the jazz label Blue Note. If you subtract the 5.1 million copies her debut album, “Come Away With Me,” has sold nationally in 2003, jazz lost ground, too. The labels’ solution is to sign artists who appeal to broader tastes. Bruce Lundvall, president and chief executive of EMI Jazz and Classics who signed Jones to Blue Note, says the transition is liberating and necessary. And he’s delighted to call Jones, whose new album debuts next week (review, page 56), a jazz artist. “Purists try to define everything very narrowly,” Lundvall says. “People who think that way are limiting the future of the music.” But if everything becomes crossover, does “the music” still exist?
Two decades ago the advent of the compact disc was a godsend for jazz and classical music: companies could repackage and resell their old recordings. Miles Davis’s 1959 “Kind of Blue” still sells 5,000 copies a week. What no one wanted to think about was what would happen after fans had bought every Miles Davis or Glenn Gould CD they wanted. Now we know. Sales of standard classical recordings have “dramatically declined,” according to Peter Gelb, president of Sony Classical, “and what’s taken their place are more contemporary or so-called crossover classical recordings,” such as his artist Bell, one of classical’s big success stories. Major companies have cut back on rereleases and new releases alike. And few new artists, unless they can demonstrate crossover potential, are getting signed.
Have things ever been worse for jazz and classical musicians? “This is the worst,” says classical composer and conductor–and sometime jazz pianist–Andre Previn. The record companies, he says, “tell you that no one buys obscure composers or pieces, so why not record Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony again? But when you suggest recording Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, they tell you there are too many on the market already. You can’t win.” Previn is even more appalled by the “hysterical” efforts of the music companies to attract new listeners–especially a recent RCA series that repackaged famous performances of the classical repertoire under labels such as “Making Out to Mozart” and “Shacking Up to Chopin.” “This is fairly typical,” he says, “but it’s still shocking.”
Jazz performers are no happier. “Jazz was always the smaller part of the labels, but it existed,” says the saxophonist Joshua Redman. “Now with the industry not selling much music of any kind, jazz has taken a bigger hit.” Trumpeter Terence Blanchard agrees: “People used to get signed because they were interesting musicians. Now if you’re not marketable, you don’t get signed.” And music executives don’t argue with that. “I have not signed a traditional jazz instrumental artist in probably three years,” says Ron Goldstein, president and chief executive of the venerable Verve Music Group. Instead, Verve is supporting its musicians’ efforts to diversify. Trumpeter Roy Hargrove, for instance, is now working on an album inspired by Brazilian samba.
When you’re dodging all the record buyers stampeding for the exits, it’s easy to miss the bright spots. Attendance at live performances holds steady, both in jazz clubs and concert halls. “There have been lots of ups and downs in 69 years, but this is not a downer,” says Lorraine Gordon, owner of New York’s legendary Village Vanguard. “When I booked Chuchu Valdes and Wynton Marsalis recently, you couldn’t get in the door.” Three years ago symphony attendance in the United States hit a record high of 32 million, with only a slight drop-off since. And not all serious musicians get shut out of the record business. Deutsche Grammophon still signs such young classical talent as pianist Lang Lang and violinist Hilary Hahn. Such jazz acts as The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau push genre boundaries by combining traditional repertoire (Thelonius Monk) with pop music (Nirvana)–as jazz musicians have done since Louis Armstrong. Recordings of classical music played on original instruments still flourish, as do recordings of contemporary classical music.
“My sales are nothing compared to the pop market,” says composer John Adams, “but they’re very healthy for the jazz or classical world.” Adams is one of the lucky classical artists who release new material when they put out CDs. He’s also lucky enough to be signed with Nonesuch Records, a division of the Warner Music Group. Decades before other labels got crossover fever, Nonesuch was combining a budget classical line with a gorgeously extensive world-music catalog. Over time the label’s roster evolved to include pop (Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris), world music (the Buena Vista Social Club), jazz (Bill Frisell) and classical (Steve Reich, the Kronos Quartet). This idiosyncratic list–which is beginning to look like the future for a lot of labels–succeeds because it reflects the genre-hopping habits of smart, younger music buyers. And Nonesuch gets the occasional windfall: the 1997 Buena Vista Social Club album, by musicians mostly past retirement age, has sold more than 6.2 million copies. If Nonesuch has done nothing else, it’s proved that you can produce crossover hits–whether Cuban jazz or Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony–without watering down the stock. In a musical world increasingly threatened by lowest-common-denominator tactics, that’s a sweet sound.
