At what age do you get into jazz?
It’s been a solid 75 years or so since jazz music was the preferred musical genre of the demographically generic Western youth.
The cliché is that jazz, once the standard bearer for “cool”, had become too intellectually challenging for the masses, particularly as rampant drug use transformed many of its best players from traditional tunesmiths into three-eyed explorers of mysterious cosmic dimensions.
It was never really jazz itself that lost its cool, though. The art form is still alive and well and played by dedicated musicians of all ages. It’s really the jazz FAN that has taken a pop cultural beating over the past couple of generations.
Some of the coolest people who’ve ever lived have proudly identified themselves as jazz fans, Clint Eastwood, Malcom X, and Björk, among them, just to select the most random trio possible. Nonetheless, when we think of a person who’s into jazz, our minds inevitably drift to a certain caricature of the cringey, out-of-touch, middle-aged hipster, constantly trying to convince the pop radio listeners around him that he’s operating on a higher frequency (and yes, “he” is usually a guy with a moustache).
This archetype was most famously depicted in media by the character of Howard Moon in the 2000s BBC comedy series The Mighty Boosh, with Julian Barratt portraying the painfully uncool 30-something jazz aficionado as the friend and foil of the New Wave rock and roll fashionista Vince Noir (Noel Fielding).
For an audience of mostly younger viewers, the comedic dynamic between these two characters worked perfectly. Vince was hyper-aware of the latest trends, riding the wave of the zeitgeist; Howard was clueless, lame, dragging down their collective street cred. Twenty years later, though, this interplay comes across very differently. Vince Noir is now the one who looks like he’s unsure of himself, desperately motivated to stay cool and relevant, a typical young person. Howard Moon, by contrast, has somewhat accepted his adulthood. He likes jazz, maybe partly because he’s a pretentious twat, but also because he really does enjoy its trance-inducing quality, no matter what other people think.
As evidence of the fact that jazz was never the target of the Boosh’s joke, Julian Barratt himself is an admitted sharer of Howard Moon’s music taste. “I sort of romanticise that era of jazz – the 40s and 50s, when it was the modern music,” Barratt told shortlist.com in 2017. “No one had heard anything like it. You can’t really make it like that now.” He also explains his theory on where the world’s Howard Moons come from.
“I think jazz is a shortcut, isn’t it, for a certain type of person who’s a little bit lost or a bit deluded,” he said. “I remember taking it to school and playing it on a tape and just seeing almost hatred coming off people as to why I was playing them this utter noise.”
The annoyance of those school kids is good evidence of our weird, ingrained instinct to doubt the authenticity of any art that seems “difficult”, as well as the people who vouch for it. The mid-life jazz fan, we presume, heard a “Morning Jazz Chillout” playlist at their local Starbucks, and now all the sudden they’re telling us how Bitches Brew is better than Kind of Blue like they’re some kind of expert, while also casually mentioning that they don’t own a TV and aren’t familiar with Taylor Swift even as a concept.
I suppose that incredibly obnoxious version of a jazz fan might exist, but it’s also possible that a lot of people discover jazz in their 30s and 40s because they’ve naturally fallen out of the target audience for mainstream pop music, and are simply expanding their horizons a bit, a very healthy instinct at any age. The same thing tends to happen with classical music and unclubby electronic music, genres which also, by no coincidence, are usually non-verbal and can operate as one’s focus or as background music during work, chores, financial discussions, nappy changes, and all of the other unfortunate shit that comes with being a boring adult.
From the perspective of a jazz musician, any new fan is probably a welcome one. They would probably just remind the newbies that jazz records are still being made in the 2020s, and that the timeline didn’t end in 1972.
