Cut the Sellouts Some Slack: Smooth Jazz and the Causes of Constrained Creativity
If you’re a jazz aficionado, you probably don’t like Smooth Jazz. And you’re not alone! Pat Metheny’s well-known letter to Harper’s Magazine criticizing Classics in the Key of G captures how many straight-ahead musicians received the new movement in the 1980s: “When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician who has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo-bluesy, out-of-tune… playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks… he… [spat] over the graves of all musicians past and present.”
Listening to tracks such as Songbird, it’s difficult to locate the same feeling of spirituality and technical mastery that one finds when listening to John Coltrane or Sun Ra. Terms used to describe Smooth Jazz include “hot tub jazz”, “muzak-style” as well as “elevator music.” While these are clearly pejorative, most would agree with them, and you would be hard-pressed to find a strong advocate for Smooth Jazz today.
In the literature, criticisms of Smooth Jazz abound. Among other things, they center on the severe reduction of improvisation, the abandonment of traditional recording styles (i.e., using pop production techniques to have a track-ready for only one soloist to come in and record), and exaggerated deference to consumer preferences that are discovered through test audiences and market research. The denial of Smooth Jazz as a genre to be praised is further reflected in a general lack of scholarship, with most secondary sources dating between 2000 and the present.
Having identified that there is a clear stigma within the jazz community surrounding Smooth Jazz, I was left curious about the role of the artist. In light of all this negative and very vocal press, what motivated many Smooth Jazz musicians to continue their controversial craft? What factors constrained sonic creativity in the 1980s, and if musicians did “sell out,” why exactly did they sell out?
Looking back at the record, I find that the political and economic context of the 1980s and 1990s made it financially impossible for jazz musicians to continue pursuing an avant-garde craft. As the music industry tended towards oligopoly, making ends meet meant having musicians, radio, and record labels compromise their creativity so as to survive in the market.
The Rise of the Smooth Jazz Format
The critique that Smooth Jazz is “commercially driven” appears frequently in the literature, but the precise mechanisms through which radio and record labels manipulated the genre are rarely developed in full. While many anecdotes reveal Smooth Jazz as explicitly commercial, the reasoning behind artistic compromises provides a strong counterpoint to the negative commentary of the jazz establishment.
Crossover hits are those that do not rigidly conform to one kind of radio format. Instead, they can be taken from one format and played on others without clashing with a format’s concept or listener expectations. In the 1980s, radio executives were primarily concerned with achieving such hits and appealing to previously untapped markets. Smooth Jazz in radio, also known as “adult contemporary,” distinguished itself by conducting rigorous audience testing to understand the market of listeners.
A popular example of the Smooth Jazz radio format is KTWV-FM 94.7 – “The Wave.” Rebranded and rescued from its previous theme of rock-based radio on February 14th, 1987, this station employed market research firms, namely Broadcast Architecture, to study the Los Angeles radio market. Firms such as Broadcast were able to test music on audiences using “interactive technologies”, where they would pay listeners to sit in an auditorium, listen to music, and evaluate their preference on bubble sheets. From this, firms were able to draw conclusions about what the people wanted to hear and could provide a list of tracks that would generate the greatest amount of listenership.
While there is nothing inherently “commercial” about researching the preferences of a city’s audiences, the extent to which conclusions from audience research affected jazz musicians’ agency speaks to some of the negative impacts associated with the development of Smooth Jazz. Although jazz musicians as early as the bebop period have interacted with media for survival, ethnomusicologist Chris Washburne notes that the Smooth Jazz radio format is unique because of its eventual monopolization of jazz on the air: “Since 1994, when KJAZ of Alameda, California went off the air, no commercial FM jazz radio stations remain which have not adopted the smooth jazz format… With their media outlet greatly reduced, jazz artists who do not play smooth jazz find themselves in a dire situation.”
Audience testing conducted by firms such as Broadcast Architecture intimately controlled what was given airplay and what was not. Shocking to us today, musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald were ruled out due to negative ratings, and any comment by an audience member that a given song was “too challenging” or “too jazzy,” sealed a track’s fate on the air.
The Role of the Musician
In this light, the commercial critiques surrounding Smooth Jazz seem justified. Audience research motivated jazz musicians to consciously tailor their compositions to fit the expectations of radio since they could not continue their craft without airplay and revenue. One salient anecdote comes from Guitarist Steve Khan, who sought to license his album Public Access to GRP, a record label that capitalized on the Adult Contemporary craze by accepting songs that fit within the criteria established by radio stations. Khan notes, “When you have a recording where the most accessible tunes are ten minutes long, I knew that if Larry took the record, he was going to chop up everything.” Seeking to preserve his concept, Khan personally financed a special radio edit CD for GRP that cut down timings under the condition that his CD would be sold to the public as originally created.
Other musicians, such as Stewart Coxhead, reveal a similar, reluctant acceptance of the Smooth Jazz format: “Nowadays when we make a record, we make two… the record we want and we make two tracks for radio. We definitely orientate at least a couple of tracks towards what smooth jazz radio sounds like now. There is a pressure now to do that, but there wasn’t then.”
One can argue that this is a clear confession that Smooth Jazz musicians are commercially driven and thus should be derided for their artistic compromise. However, this criticism is short-sighted and ignores key fundamental factors. The most important takeaway from the voices of these jazz musicians from the 1980s should not be that they sold out, but that they did not want to sell out to the Smooth Jazz market. Insofar as musicians such as Khan and Coxhead are “commercially driven,” the choice to conform to the Smooth Jazz format is more of a survival mechanism than a product of the artist’s complete free will. This understanding might compel critics to reallocate scorn from Smooth Jazz musicians to the greater establishment (record labels and radio), thereby opening the door to more productive conversations about the current state of jazz.
Compromise was not unique to individual musicians, however, as radio executives also felt constrained in their ability to present audiences with new, more creative styles of music. The widespread popularity of Adult Contemporary made it so that programmers no longer had opportunities to demonstrate their expertise through their song selection. Allen Kepler, owner of the Smooth Jazz Network states that “[people] tune into the radio to be entertained. We try to achieve this balance…[but] if we push too hard with too much new music or too much eclectic stuff, we’ll lose them.” As evidenced by Kepler, radio executives’ adherence to the Smooth Jazz format was also not entirely out of their own free will.
In many instances, executives were forced to respond to political and social pressures of the time by narrowing artistic exploration. In response to Beatlemania and the rise of rock’n’roll in the 60s, jazz’s commercial viability continually dwindled in the latter half of the 20th century. This decline in market share only worsened with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated radio and allowed for media conglomerates such as Clear Channel Communications to buy up unlimited numbers of small independent stations across the United States.
Thus, while executives are technically complicit in promoting the rise of a homogenous-sounding Smooth Jazz, a more holistic analysis recognizes that political and economic developments forced the hand of smaller-firm (and often less “commercially driven”) executives. To comply meant centralizing production and narrowing the creative license of musicians, but to resist meant company failure and absorption into another music label that would choose the Smooth Jazz format anyway. That audience research and market demands motivated Smooth Jazz is clear. However, it is also clear that the musicians and executives behind the movement were responding to something beyond their control. Survival in the market inevitably meant some artistic compromise, but the lack of complete agency clears the blame of these musicians just being “sell-outs” with little to offer to jazz.
Recasting Smooth Jazz
It is clear then, that Smooth Jazz musicians and record labels were beholden to the market. Label executives recognized that the market was shrinking as firms increasingly consolidated, and they adopted the Smooth Jazz/Adult Contemporary format in order to survive as opposed to being absorbed by a company that would just do the same thing anyway. Radio hired firms to do rigorous audience testing, prioritizing very particular and palatable sounds as opposed to artists’ choices. Jazz musicians of the time, despite envisioning longer pieces and more “far-out” endeavors, felt that they had to conform to the mellow parameters of this genre. Not conforming meant not having a job to make ends meet, and they became Smooth Jazz musicians.
Having established these points, the continued rage and frustration of the jazz community surrounding Smooth Jazz is understandable. How is it possible that the biggest-selling instrumental musician is not Louis Armstrong, not Charlie Parker, not Coltrane… but Kenny G? Even after recognizing that the jazz market was confined and manipulated in order to adapt to political, social, and economic pressures, the fact that there is no one to blame for this reduced quality of music creates an uncomfortable dissonance. Economic forces are invisible, and in an ideal world, there would be enough money to go around so that people could pursue as wild and expressive forms of jazz as they would like. Unfortunately, we do not live in that ideal world, and we balance between the impulse to agree with Metheny’s characterization of Kenny G’s music as “lame-ass, jive, pseudo-bluesy” and “out-of-tune,” versus the moving anecdotes of musicians such as Steve Khan and Stewart Coxhead. As with many things, a clear path forward is unclear, but a recognition of the reduced agency of Smooth Jazzers challenges the popular discourse and might catalyze more productive conversations about where jazz is and where it is headed.
