Jazz in Transit - Zurich

May 12, 2014, 8:00am Central European Time. Getting most of my jazz in transit these days. On my way from Africa to Europe, transiting through Zurich this time. Like a different world in cleanliness, orderliness, efficiency and population density from the day-to-day world I inhabit. “Africa Rising” has a long way to go.

Stuck in an early morning change of planes, the only place to get a coffee was the “Montreux Jazz Café” in Terminal D. Only airport I have ever been to that has a 3-meter-high photo of Miles on the wall (granted, a near-death Miles in a track suit and big sunglasses caught eating a sandwich). I sat down and had a $25 latte and baguette. Am I really out of it or has money lost its value – particularly the dollar?

There was a wall-sized TV playing video from the 2012 Montreux Jazz Festival. Most of the acts were far from my idea of “jazz”, but I did manage to catch one clip of Dave Liebman playing a Trane tribute with Swiss pianist George Gruntz. Liebman looked like Bad Grandpa on soprano but sure sounded sweet. Almost everything else I saw consisted of middle aged white men wearing black, lots of vocals, stuff I would call pop/lounge with little improvisation (other than the memorized kind of course), swing, or dissonance/blue notes.

Well what do I know? Picked up the program for the upcoming 48th Montreux Jazz Festival in July and Stevie Wonder is one of the headliners. A couple of decent acts – Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette with John Coltrane’s and Jimmy Garrison’s “kids” in his band (both now older than their fathers when they tore up the sky), Dr. John – great but not jazz. But about 50 other rock, pop, and lounge acts. Ugh.

Aha – a jump-suited Herbie Hancock now on the video playing Chameleon on some kind of toy-looking shoulder-slung electronic keyboard. I guess he knows what side his bread is buttered on because what I am watching is far from groundbreaking. Bar band music for a big paycheck. Borderline embarrassing. Herbie – Nooooo!

I am carrying my horn today for the first time in a while so somehow feel compelled to stand up for the music for its own sake. A ticket for Montreux this year? An All Music Pass “valid for standing room access during the entire festival”  is a mere CHF 2,000 – more than $2,200! Festival sponsors include SOCAR – the state oil company of Azerbaijan, a friendly family dictatorship (where is Rain Sultanov, then, Azerbaijan’s premier horn man?), and UBS, the bank famous for assisting money launderers worldwide that has paid huge sums to the US Government to settle tax evasion charges.

Has jazz just become another way the self-appointed elites of the world express their exclusiveness and erudition? Another form of classical music? So far from its roots in exactly the opposite – the cry of freedom. Where is the cry of freedom in jazz today? How do we purge the music of its conservatory-trained enfants terrible, doobie-doo vocalists and middle aged men cashing their checks? How can auditorium-loads of human beings sit through this pap – especially at ticket prices higher than the annual GDP per capita of most of the countries I work in? How did these acts get on the bill in the first place? And I just read that last year’s Montreux Jazz Festival attracted 250,000 visitors. George Clinton might ask, where is the funk?