Claude Wilson, Contributor

Jazz, the African-American-inspired music which started at the beginning of the century in New Orleans, had been explored and certainly assumed by earlier Jamaican musicians. But, the music born of black heritage is not only now being marginalised in reggae/dancehall land but also is in abject decline at its roots.

The audience for jazz in America is both ageing and shrinking at an alarming rate, according to the latest Survey of Public Participation conducted by the US National Endowment for the Arts and published in The Wall Street Journal.

Here in Jamaica, the audience for jazz is perpetually diminutive and is ageing, and local radio minimally engages this music originated by our own people. Yet, jazz has had more than enough perfunctory bright days to recall an inexhaustible register of names and places in Jamaican jazz.

Our earliest music-minded travellers arrived on Pan American Airways with stacks of imported 78 rpm jazz records and subsequently we were playing home-blend jazz live with the likes of master trumpeter Sonny Bradshaw with his Seven/Big Band. Thereafter, Jamaica produced internationally recognised pianist Monty Alexander and guitar legend Ernest 'Ernie' Ranglin.

Second generation

A second generation was to emerge that included Harold McNair, a flutist of impeccable talent. Contemporaneous with McNair, with similar overseas visibility, were Leslie 'Jiver' Hutchinson (trumpeter), Dizzy Reece (trumpet), Joe Harriott (alto saxophone) and Bertie King (saxophone, clarinet). With few prospects in the homeland, many of these musicians opted to ply their craft overseas in more lucrative, artistically motivating concert halls; they became renowned in jazz clubs of Europe and the United States.

On the home front, however, a later wave of musicians who played mainly improvised music appeared at some of Kingston's most notable venues. Names like Headley Jones (guitar), former government minister Seymour 'Foggy' Mullings (piano), Cedric Brooks (saxophone, flute), Myrna Hague (vocalist), Carl 'Cannonball' Bryan (tenor sax), Roy Burrowes (trumpet), Wilton Gaynair (tenor sax), Totlyn Jackson (vocalist), Billy Cook and Reuben Alexander (drummer).

Straight-ahead jazz musicians are today a rarity in Jamaica and they are the older breed who, like their contemporary colleagues, are not well paid. To survive, our young jazz musicians play the field of jazz, reggae and dancehall to make ends meet.

A contemporary list of jazz players embrace Desi Jones (drums), Seretse Small (guitars), Dr Kathy Brown (piano), Harold Davis (piano), Deleon White (drums), Denver Smith (percussions), Akil Karam (drums), Djenne Greaves (percussions), Sherwayne Thompson (bass), Aeion Hoilett (bass), John Williams (multi-instrumentalist) Maurice Gordon (guitars) Marjorie Whylie (piano), Alicia (singer) Dennis Rushton (piano), Dale Haslam (bass), Dale Brown (bass), Ouida Lewis (percussions), Charmaine Limonius (pianist, singer), Alex Martin (piano) Karen Smith (songstress), Christine Fisher, Peter Ashbourne, Michael Sean Harris (vocalist), Othneil Lewis (keyboards) and others unrecalled.

The calendar concerts are a handful, Jazz in the Garden (bimonthly), Jazz on the Green (annual), Harold Davis Moonlighting is inconsistent, Ocho Rios International Jazz Festival (annual), Optimist Jazz Show (annual), and Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival (annual), a jazz show by nomenclature.

Jazz is played with some consistency at Christopher's Jazz Café, Redbones the Blues Café, Rib Kage Restaurant, The Jamaica Pegasus hotel, Terra Nova Hotel and one time at The Event Place (Montego Bay) and at other open houses that we inadvertently omit.

Of the 20-odd radio stations, currently only two stations have dedicated jazz segments. There are three programmes that are known to air jazz-oriented music, namely Riffin (Dermot Hussey) on News Talk 93 FM, cut from five to two nights per week, Sunday Brunch (Monty 'Merritone' Blake) on News Talk 93FM and Sunday Bess (Lou Gooden) on BESS 100 FM.

Personalities in Jamaican jazz

Some personalities in Jamaican jazz include Keith Brown (musicologist), Ken Nelson (Jazz in the Gardens), Walter Elmore (Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival), Sonny Bradshaw and Myrna Hague (Ocho Rios Jazz Festival), Mutabaruka and Dermot Hussey (musicologists/presenters), Michael Edwards (journalist) and Herbie Miller (jazz historian).

In The Wall Street Journal article highlighting the survey on the declining audience for jazz in America, it asked the rhetorical question. How do you get young people to start listening to jazz again?

I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.

By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners - not next month, not next week, but right now.

Jazz buff and writer Michael Edwards opined that this is not as disconcerting as it might seem. "There are actions that we can all take to chart the way forward - such as getting the music in the schools (especially in inner-city communities) and also having more 'sound systems' airing jazz/global records publicly, on the streets, in public places."