A Complaint

Okay, okay, okay, I get it. Jazz music isn't popular. To many, it's something that old people enjoy, to others it's easy-listening background music for quasi-sophisticated restaurants and lounges. The media assumes that none of their readers have any clue what the music is or who the performers are, and that even fewer care. Unfortunately, they're usually correct.   

Case in point: in today's NY Times news quiz, one of the questions was "The jazz legend Sonny Rollins died on Monday at 95. What instrument did he play?" The multiple choices were bass, drums, saxophone, trumpet, and xylophone. To put the question another way, the way jazz fans would put it, "What instrument did the Saxophone Colossus play?" But given the fact that the sax is the dominant instrument in jazz, the answer should be obvious to even the most casual reader. Still, 24% got it wrong. 

To put the assumed ignorance of jazz into perspective, another question in the same quiz, presumably on the same order of difficulty, was, "The New York Knicks are back in the NBA Finals for the first time in years. What was the No. 1 movie at the box office last time they reached the finals?" Not what year, not who was president, but what was the top-grossing movie at the time? If you ask me, a question of the same difficult as "What instrument did saxophonist Sonny Rollins play?" would be "The New York Knicks are back in the N.B.A. Finals for the first time in years. What sport do they play?"  By the way, the answer to the actual question is "Citizen Kane."

But that's not my complaint. The media photo editors, who obviously know nothing about jazz in general or Sonny Rollins in particular, all included recent photographs of the 95-year-old Rollins in their obits and stories about his passing, such as this one that popped up when you answered the question in the news quiz: 

Yes, that is Rollins, but that's not how he looked during the great majority of his 60-year performing career. But it is how those editors imagine his fans probably look, and the constant use of pictures of him in the last years of his life solidifies the impression in the popular imagination that he was some old geezer who tooted on a horn for your grandparents. Here he is in 1963, at probably the height of his popularity and celebrity, sporting a Mohawk a decade and a half before the look was popularized by punk rockers:

The same thing happened with Carla Bley when she passed away at age 87. The press predominantly ran the most recent pictures of her that they had on file, and the public was taught that she looked something like this:

Which is true. That's the performer I saw at Big Ears in 2023, but that's certainly not the one I saw in Boston's Copley Square in 1977, or at the Paradise Theater in '79. Back in her day, Carla was a babe. She got her start as a cigarette girl at Birdland. Cigarette girls, if you don't know, were attractive young women who sold cigarettes table to table at nightclubs in the '40s and '50s, often flirting with customers in the hopes of better tips. She was the leggy wife and muse to jazz pianist Paul Bley, and later the mini-skirted arranger and composer to large free-jazz ensembles led by second husband Michael Mantler, and then still later, the jazz-fusion bandleader performing on the rock-club circuit at places like, well, Boston's Paradise Theater. The Carla Bley of my memory looks more like this:

Now, at 72 years of age myself, I'm as opposed to ageism as anyone and agree that images of these artists in their later years are nothing to be ashamed of. But when all articles and obituaries only show the most recent images on file, it just reinforces negative stereotypes in the popular imagination of jazz and the age of its artists and fans. We're all dandelions, morphing from one form to another through life, but we can choose to remember some of our favorite dandelions in our favorite phases of theirs, and not necessarily in their last phase before the puffball was blown away.