Music on the Internet

Lawrence (Larry) Applebaum, a noted US jazz critic, visited Kyiv for three days at the US Embassy’s invitation. He is also a producer and leading jazz expert at the Library of Congress, and the curator of a series of films about jazz. He has also hosted music programs on WPFW for more than twenty years.

Mr. Applebaum’s program in Kyiv was quite diversified. He attended a rehearsal of the children’s jazz group “Little Band Academia”, directed by Viktor Basiuk. After listening to the young performers, the American guest praised their professional skill. Mr. Applebaum met with students of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and was pleasantly surprised by their knowledge of US culture, particularly jazz. He also visited the audio funds of the Vernadsky National Library, and the recording company Lemma, gave a lecture at the Jazz Department of the Gliere College of Music, and attended a concert of the Ukrainian group Skhid (East). At the 44 Art Club, he took part in a discussion with jazz critics and media people.

Focusing on jazz life in the US, Larry Applebaum said that ten or twenty years ago jazz mostly interested bohemians and outsiders. Today, largely owing to US trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis, the attitude to jazz in American society and its entire mythology has essentially changed. Marsalis is an excellent organizer of the jazz process and indefatigable leader. In New York City this academically trained musician, who is adept at both jazz and classical music, created an 18-hour series of television and radio programs recounting the history of jazz and its performers. His programs are educational: thanks to Marsalis, jazz has risen to the level of serious music. This musician has become “the voice of jazz.” He succeeded in introducing it at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, a large cultural complex with a philharmonic concert hall, theater, library and museum of the performing arts, the famous conservatory — the Julliard School — as well as the no less renowned Metropolitan Opera, and park with an open-air stage for symphony performances.

Larry told those present that the US is experiencing a period of extreme polarization. Music is now divided into traditional music that sells well and is easily understood and favored by the largest recording companies, like Tower Records, and intellectual music, whose performers have a difficult time gaining access to concert halls and recording studios. The press shares the opinion of managers, who serve corporate interests and self-styled newspaper censors, who monitor how information penetrates the press and advertising content.

Mr. Applebaum also said that record companies share only 3% of the proceeds from the sale of CDs with performing artists and only after paying for production and promotion. This has led musicians, who create intellectual music aimed at a limited number of listeners, to look for a way out by self-financing new albums. It costs approximately $30,000 to produce an album. The recording is put out on the Internet so music buffs can download whatever they prefer. The download costs about the same as a record label’s CD sold at music stores. The performer receives 85% of the revenues through the Internet and this is where his exploitation by a manager ends. There is a network of some twelve organizations that stage concerts of new creative music and jazz. It includes enthusiastic producers who organize concerts through the Internet by sending ads to avant-garde devotees (some 500 ads before every concert) and broadcasting announcements on their radio programs and placing information in newspapers. Tickets are inexpensive ($10) and the proceeds are divided among the performers. Over the past four years Larry and some like-minded friends have organized about a hundred of these concerts. He says that although this doesn’t solve the problem, it is an example of new thinking that is aimed at helping noncommercial music to survive, now that the main emphasis is on making a profit. When asked by The Day whether there is a rapprochement between jazz and non-jazz avant-garde trends, Larry said that the Library of Congress occasionally commissions creative artists to produce new works, with the result that jazz pieces are beginning to sound remarkably academic.

Larry Applebaum played some interesting audio and video recordings of new American jazz. He believes that one culture produces certain values, while another consumes them, assimilating them in its own way and returning them to the public. He observed this process in Japan, where he lived briefly and saw that the Japanese have a markedly serious attitude to jazz.

In order to learn how contemporary Ukrainian music is developing, Larry took home the best samples of Ukrainian creative, folk, and jazz music, as well as the latest recordings of Ukrainian performers, including recordings by Enver Izmailov, the male vocal sextet ManSound, and others. From Kyiv he headed for Lviv.