How Not to Broaden the Jazz Canvas (Carnegie Hall Jazz Band)

Abstract The unceremonious booting of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band from Carnegie Hall is old news, but hasn’t been much addressed in or out of the jazz press, perhaps because George Wein, whose baby the CHJB was, capitulated without a fight to the hall’s new executive director, Robert J. Harth. The public excuse, and it’s a beaut, is that the hall wants to expand its presentation of jazz by looking to a wide variety of artists rather than one ensemble. Oh joy!—I so look forward to eating the words I’m about to deploy. Harth, the son of two concert violinists who was previously in charge of the Aspen Music Festival, where presentation of jazz was nonexistent, has told CHJB conductor and music director Jon Faddis that he intends no artistic slight. He just wants to broaden the jazz canvas. Apparently, the CHJB’s four evenings a year were getting in the way. So much jazz, so little time. Actually, not only hasn’t Carnegie ever presented much jazz, it’s not in the business of producing concerts; it leases its hall to producers and institutions for that purpose. One producer remarked last week that he had been asked to mount jazz concerts several years back precisely because, a Carnegie bigwig told him, the hall had been so inimical for so long to African American music. He suspects that the latest slight is nothing more than good old elitist disdain. I’m uncomfortable with the word elitist, which can apply to jazz connoisseurs as well as any other kind, but it would be hard not to conclude that a time-honored prejudice is at work.