The Audience Is Shrinking

"Through These Portals Pass the MOST" is, as it certainly should be, the motto painted above the stairway that leads down from Broadway into Birdland. Out on the street, the club calls itself "the JAZZ Corner of the WORLD," and, in fact, Birdland has long been everything to modern jazz that Colonial Williamsburg is to the D.A.R.--the cradle, the shrine, the place where things are perfect. But now, regrettably, the sign must come down.

"Birdland has gone off the cool," says Owner Oscar Goodstein, in the simple pursuit of "good nightclub entertainment." Since modern jazz no longer makes many pretenses about being entertaining to the foot stompers, Birdland is now proudly presenting such audience winners as Dodo Green, DeeDee Ford, the Allegros and the Jive Bombers. The new acts have a "visual" appeal, Goodstein says, that brings some new cheer into the room. As for their music, it is mainly of the clang-clang-clang-baby school, played with the thumping beat of a garbage can rolling down a flight of stairs.

Bop Ruled the Night. The esthetic decline involved in this defection is all but unthinkable to Birdland's old habitues, who knew the place as the remaining link to the great days of the early '50s, when bop ruled the night on 52nd Street and Broadway. The club was christened in honor of Charlie "Bird" Parker, and its stars have been mainly his musical descendants. Now Miles Davis is no longer welcome, and neither is Thelonious Monk or John Coltrane; their music, Goodstein thinks, has become too involuted and personal to please Birdland's current customers. The new regime is lively and loud, but it seems as anomalous as presenting harmonica players at the Philharmonic; the old hipsters come to the door, look on in sad disbelief, then wander away. For jazz, the pain of such events is becoming more than merely artistic. "There's a parking lot there now" describes much of the old jazz scene in New York, Chicago and California, and even the best jazz musicians have to scuffle to stay busy. The scene changes from year to year--the Five Spot and the Half-Note in New York and the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco are now much like Birdland ten years ago --but the audience is steadily shrinking. Even in Manhattan, there are many nights when fewer than 200 people buy a drink to hear a serious jazzman play.

Squares Are In. The players say the problem is that nightclubs have priced jazz out of the reach of its best and most understanding audience, but this is only partly true. Jazz has lost all its gaiety; its musicians commonly drive their listeners away by discouraging any pleasure in the act of perceiving the sounds. The audience that remains plays it cool, and the atmosphere that results is dire and deeply uncomfortable.

Jazzmen have done little to reverse these unhappy trends. Many musicians seem to feel that malaise in the audience proves the merit of the music; when the squares start enjoying themselves, something has gone wrong. But the shrinking of the jazz scene has already badly damaged the atmosphere for making music. There is so little sense of com munity among the 1,000 or so jazzmen in New York that a genuine after-hours jam session is as rare and astonishing as a triple play. And now, with Birdland gone, where's home?

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