By repertoire we mean a cannon of oft repeated lite styles, and the influence of modern technology upon the way music is made. Well there is a reason for the confusion. Today s recording studios, at the behest of industry moguls, use templates, formulas and boiler plates that make production efficient and fast, to get the product to market. Gone are the days of budgets to pay the top studio musicians to work on your new release. Whom ever is running the recording industry is either in the wrong line of work, or recent divorcee who got stuck with child support and alimony.
Profit margins are bigger, but so are the unemployment lines for the musicians.
Unless one is lucky enough to be in cahoots with the decision makers in this new work arrangement, you re plum out of luck - and may wind up keeping your day job, indefinitely. Jazz, once a thriving body of innovative and fluid music, is being killed. Jazz is a communal music dependent on proximity, not detachment from people. Maybe we have become so disconnected from each other that jazz, which is dependent on the interplay of audience and musician, can no longer be created in the way it has been in the past. The American Negro slave, faced in 1865 with an instinctive urge to create music and forced, in the absence of any previous knowledge, to start from rock-bottom, he was compelled to draw primarily upon the inspiration of his own mind.