Surprisingly, ignorance and inquisitiveness make an effective team if combined in just the right manner. Fortunately, for facing the task of picking the brains of jazz’s biggest “cheerleader” in the Northwest, John Gilbreath, the combination was perfect. Who better to play 21 jazz questions with, than a man who’s organized over a thousand jazz concerts and educational presentations, as well as hosted two jazz shows on two separate radio stations?  More than a flash in the pan fan, John spends a majority of his waking moments striving to keep this thing called jazz alive and thriving.

Ethx: Considering the longevity of jazz and how long it’s been around now, do you think it has continued to experience innovation?

I tend to embrace the broader definition of jazz; I see it as a big word. There certainly are factions of jazz -- it's a funny little world in some ways, because it's a subset of a larger world that has many more subsets and in some ways those subsets are happy to fight with one another. So to answer part of your question: yes, jazz has stopped growing in a certain segment and people are just replaying various other aspects of it. There are people that are just replaying Dixieland jazz or "trad" (traditional) jazz. There are dyed-in-the-wool beboppers and they just play bebop, like Floyd Standifer. In certain genres it is limited and it's rehashing itself. But generally speaking, the whole genre is reinventing itself and I think it has an imperative to invent itself. Part of the history of jazz is the progression and expansion of jazz; it's built into it. Essentially it is never the same this year as it was last year, and won't be the same ten years from now. For people like me, sometimes change doesn't come fast enough, because I really want to hear the new stuff and hear progression happen. For other people the change is happening too fast, and they don't want it to change at all. I mean, people listen to oldies radio!...After attending numerous jazz conferences across the country this year, and especially after attending the Jazz Educators Conference put on by the International Association for Jazz Education, I had a good little epiphany at the main stage in that the whole standard repertoire that was being performed by the student ensemble from the Thelonious Monk Institute with Herbie Hancock. This whole repertoire was Ornette Coleman compositions and Herbie Hancock compositions and other things that five years ago would have been considered way too avant-garde for student ensembles to play. They wouldn't even touch that. There are even people in the progressive movement, when Ornette Coleman started doing his stuff, and that was back in the 50s for Christ's sake, they were just aghast at how different and unorthodox it was. So it occurred to me that this itself was evidence of progression even though the progression is happening a lot slower than you want it to. But history proves what's going to happen there and history moves kind of slowly.

Ethx: Which of the subgenres do you see as experiencing the most amount of success or growth? I'm not sure how you'd categorize those, but let's say a growing fan base and number of individuals that want to play it and write it?

That's a good question -- and a key question. How do you categorize success? What kind of yardsticks and measurements do you use? For our organization (Earshot), ...just being here next year, considering we're dependent on grants and donation, that is success. But where I think the juice is in this music, though I firmly believe it's rooted in the African-American, certainly it's not confined by this experience anymore. It's spread around the world. It's intersected with all kinds of other traditional music. It's expanded within itself and, in fact, there's forward momentum within the African American experience, like the black avant-garde, and the artists are just doing some very interesting music.... Jazz's growth is irrepressible. I really see this continuum, that it does have this bold and colorful past, but it's got a really good present day and a bright future.

Ethx: I know a huge focus of Earshot is increasing listenership, especially through education. Is jazz seeing an increase in listenership, or has its numbers plateaued?

That's the funny thing, it ebbs and flows, but it actually seems to be going down some. I don't know the answer to that [decline], but I just have this calm faith that it's going to get better. There are some paradoxes within the music, and one of them is that on the one hand we want this music to be more popular and get big audiences, but on the other hand we don't want it to get too popular. Part of the attraction is that people like to feel like they're special.

Ethx: The exclusivity of it?

Something like that. I think that because the music is so strong, it is personally internalized with the people that love it and they love it in their own way. And that develops the exclusivity. Similarly, with all the jazz artists that are working hard, they want to be successful and sell a lot of records and have people come to their concerts, but when one of their peers does get successful and has a bigger selling record (keep in mind, that's about 10,000 albums in jazz), people are quick to dismiss them and say they sold out or say that it can't be good because it's popular. […] In truth, there is talk in the recording industry that all of jazz accounts for about 3% of the total unit sales in the record business, and of that 3%, there are only handful of artists that make up 50% of that. So everybody else in the world is only selling 1.5% of the total sales. So it's not a huge numbers thing, and a lot of the major labels have just dumped their jazz artists and divisions, like Warner Bros just recently dumped its jazz division. So you see two things: only a few bigger record labels, Verve and Blue Note, with Blue Note riding off the crest of the Norah Jones phenomenon...

Ethx (as I rudely interrupt his train of thought): I was going to ask you that, as far as perceptions are concerned, do the jazz community or jazz artists like the idea of Norah (Jones) or someone like her doing so well that might draw listeners back again? Or do they think that she's the epitome of a sell-out and we don't want fans like that?

I think what I hear is, "She's not jazz." By virtue of being of Blue Note, that doesn't mean she has to be jazz person. I've heard her say that she's not a jazz artist. She doesn't really improvise, though she does play with jazz artists. And on the other side, Diana Krall has sold quite a few albums. I'm inclined not to dismiss either one of them, and it's all good and all fine. And if by virtue of Norah Jones, Blue Note can be so bolstered that they think that they're cool... the cooler they think they are, the more artists they'll be able to take on and support. So it's all good in some ways.

Ethx: That leads nicely into my other question. Blue Note recently had a hip-hop producer, Madlib, remix their catalogue and then released both his remix album and the original pieces he sampled. Do you like seeing projects of that nature, or hip-hop artists sampling jazz in general?

I love that. Love it. Verve a few years back remixed a bunch of jazz vocals, Billy Holiday and Nina Simone, those are really hip. Similarly, there are a lot of mainstream jazz musicians that are working with DJs as an ensemble member. There's a new CD out with the trumpeter Wallace Roney, he's very much part of the hard bop/acoustic Miles Davis camp, with a full-on ensemble and he's working with DJ Logic, who's showed up on a bunch of jazz records, to some pretty good effect. It's probably one of the things that I like about jazz that's happened over the years. It's not a new phenomenon. In some ways, and it hasn't always worked out right, it's been quite wonderful that...going backwards in time to the 70's when jazz went through a major change and Miles started with his electric bands and a lot of the jazz world went into the jazz funk thing, which is now being sampled and revisited. At the time others thought people were floundering or trying anything to get record sales back, because rock was seeing huge sales and they were incorporating certain elements of that. There's always been that willingness to flex and to move in different directions. It happened in the 50s and 60s; I think the music is always in some sort of motion. I'm thinking Dizzy Gillespie hooking up with Chana Pozo and doing the Cuban thing way before anyone was glorifying Cuban music. They just have this insatiable appetite to find something new. Like Charlie Parker knocking on Igor Stravinsky's door that time in California just because he was making cool music and he heard he lived there. There's always a willingness to...like imagine a river, they have a willingness to take a tributary. I don't know where it'll land, but I don't think people are supposed to know where it'll land.

Ethx: That's part of the appeal -- the unknown.

For more information on Earshot Jazz, check out: www.earshotjazz.org. Furthermore, listen to John on KEXP 90.3 or KBCS 91.3 for a full coverage of the expansive jazz spectrum.

Contact: djethx@musicaentertainment.com