For those few of us who listen: two Village Voice critics grapple with the state of ‘serious’ music today. First, from Kyle Gann, Death Wish “New music is at an impasse — you can’t convince people it exists.

There is a certain small culture around it, but it is impossible to get power brokers outside that culture to believe that anything is going on. The offcial line is, classical music is finished, a closed book, Glass, Reich, and maybe John Zorn the end of history. And it does not help that jazz is ever more officially referred to as “America’s classical music.” First of all, what is that supposed to do for jazz? Legitimize it, make it blandly respectable and therefore ignorable? And it slaps those composers whose training is classical out of the water. With the Wynton Marsalis crowd threatening to bring jazz history to a close and turn it into a repertoire museum, jazz musicians who believe in the ongoing evolution of the art are in the same boat as the new-music people. We need to band together.”

And Voice jazz critic Larry Blumenfeld <a href=”http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0102/blumenfeld.shtml
“>blasts the Ken Burns documentary currently on PBS, echoing much the same concern about the Marsalis hegemony, as I wrote about several months ago. Burns has said that this is a series that isn’t supposed to be for those who already listen to jazz, and dismisses criticism from the jazz critic community, who have complained that it is unduly classicist at the expense of the living tradition of improvisation and the “embrace of entropy” that lies at the heart of jazz. “Burns’s film may raise jazz’s water level in our culture at large, as the record-company executives hope, but it may also signal a final dry season for the music’s forward flow.”