Jazz in the Digital Age

Around 20 years ago at KWMU (now St. Louis Public Radio), I was talking to our chief engineer, Joe Kupferer, about CDs and hard drives for storing music. I was at a point in my collecting where I was trading my LPs for CDs. I have been collecting jazz LPs since 1959, and at its height, my collection numbered over 6000 LPs, taking up a significant portion of my living room. I remember Joe had said he believed that at a time not too distant in the future, all our music would be stored on huge hard drives and accessed and bought on line. This was just as the Internet was becoming important in the dissemination of information. I never forgot that conversation. That prediction has come true.

I always have paid for most of the music heard on my show, Jazz Unlimited, and by 2008, had amassed a collection of nearly 3500  CDs with many limited edition box sets, but I stopped buying CDs that year, except for the occasional limited edition box set of music that I considered historically important. I have continued my music collecting using legal download sites that I pay a monthly subscription fee to. Jazz Unlimited has been completely digital since 2006. Every week, I create, edit, mix and normalize over 100 digital music and voice files. I bring the show to the St. Louis Public Radio studio every Sunday night on a flash drive.

Digital music has changed the industry, and hopefully, destroyed the business model that has been effect since record companies, both black- and white-owned, began producing 78 rpm records in the 1920s. That business model has always been, “Screw the Artist.” Many of the recording industry’s practices have been detailed in Randy Sandke’s revealing book Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz. Basically the record companies, with a few exceptions, have used funny accounting practices, over charges for studio time, etc. to wring every penny from their artists. Even many best-selling artists left their record companies owing money. Most have no control of their master recordings. A few in jazz, like Cannonball Adderley, owned their masters and had control of their music.

Today, artists have much more control of their product because the digital recording equipment is now so cheap. Expensive studio time is not needed, and it is very cheap to produce CDs. Seeing this, the major entertainment companies lobbied Congress to pass what is known as the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998,” which gives these companies control of their music and images in perpetuity. Copyrights do not expire after 75 years. Nothing else will ever be in the public domain. This also has been called “The Mickey Mouse Copyright Act,” because it was passed just before most of the Disney characters would have come off copyright. The Supreme Court said that it was a bad law, but nothing could be done about it. Unfortunately, there are many on the Internet who violate copyright laws because they think everything should be free. There has to be a way that artists can be paid for their work.

Artists must free themselves from the major companies, so that they can produce and sell their own product with no middleman taking most of their profits. This has two drawbacks: distribution and promotion. Jazz is such a marginal music today because the music industry has not promoted it heavily since the “Swing Era” of the 1930s through World War II. This is a “chicken and egg” question. Is jazz marginal because the majors stopped promoting it, or is jazz not promoted because it always has been beyond mass public tastes?

Today’s promotion consists of mailing a CD out with laudatory press releases to the few remaining radio stations that play jazz. After hearing the music, I have stopped reading the press releases because it ofted does not live up to the hype. Some interviews are offered. It is so cheap to produce a CD these days that I am inundated with music, much of it copies of past styles, very derivative and not from the heart. Since I’ve been collecting jazz since 1959, I know a good jazz recording from a derivative one. For instance, I no longer play singers doing standards the way people like Ella Fitzgerald did them. The model now seems to be to get on the “Jazz Charts,” which have nothing to do with artistry but are all about popularity. It is still tied to physical product.

Distribution can be carried out by entities such as Amazon.com or CDBaby (to name two) or their own home pages on the internet, thus cutting out much of the exorbitant expenses added by the major record companies to the cost of a recording.

Unfortunately, getting noticed in the deluge of mediocrity that seems to characterize our popular art is very hard. I have no answer for that. I believe that an artist can only get noticed by our media consumers, who seem to have the emotional maturity of 14-year-old boys, by weird or violent or aggressive behavior or dress. This does not bode well for cutting-edge artists who are doing things too subtle for 14-year-old minds.

It is not enough now just to be an artist; you have to also be a business person or hire people who won’t cheat you to do the mundane everyday things that get you noticed: Facebook fan pages, Twitter feeds and email letters to those who buy your product. The ArtistShare model seems to work for people like Maria Schneider, Jim Hall, the Clayton Brothers and other jazz artists. That may be an answer. The important thing is that I suspect that when artists can have complete control over their product, they can make a living, not an expensive or lavish one, but a comfortable one. 

I have written the distributors who deluge me with promo CDs to send me links; I have not succeeded in turning off that faucet. But I now realize that virtual music is the only way to go. I wish that every virtual album I purchase would come with a .pdf file, because reading liner notes is one of the joys of album collecting. I now think that physical  CDs are a waste of time and resources.

Because of my situation with the death of my wife in 2008, I have to move to a smaller space and cannot take my collection of physical CDs with me. It was donated to the Webster University Jazz Department in October of 2011. As the collection was being picked up, I felt like I was giving away my children. Those children are in a good place and my virtual collection continues. There was a concert honoring my donation at Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium on Monday, March 19 at 7 p.m. It was a good evening. The concert featured St. Louis jazz music ranging from Scott Joplin and Frank Trumbauer to David Sanborn and Oliver Lake.

Dennis Owsley has broadcast a weekly jazz show for St. Louis Public Radio (KWMU-FM) continuously since April 1983. Professionally, he holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and is a retired Monsanto Senior Science Fellow and college teacher. His current show, “Jazz Unlimited,” is heard every Sunday night from 9 p.m. to midnight. The show has the largest jazz audience in St. Louis and was named “Best Jazz Radio Show” in St. Louis for the years 2005–07 and 2009 by the Riverfront Times. In celebration of his 25 years on the air, January 24, 2008, was proclaimed Dennis Owsley Day in the City of St. Louis. Owsley is the 2010 winner of the St. Louis Public Radio Millard S. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award. Dennis is also a noted photographer. His one-man exhibit, “In the Moment: Photographs of Jazz Musicians,” ran from September 23, 2005, to January 21, 2006, at the Sheldon Art Galleries. His images have been published in music textbooks, on websites, and on several CD covers. He is a lifetime student of jazz history and teaches short courses on the subject to any group that wants him. Owsley is the author of the award-winning first book on St. Louis jazz history, City of Gabriels: The History of Jazz in St. Louis, 1985–1973 (Reedy Press, 2006).