Response to “Jazz in Bloom” by Jeffrey Felshman, published 26 January, 2001, by Chicago Reader:
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Anyone who has come up against academic committees that are more interested in your resumé than your sound can appreciate Bloom’s achievement. Music is still, by and large, the last profession where demonstrative skill wins out over academic record, but often at the cost of ostracism, rancor, and the jealousy of the PhD Mafia. As one who is familiar with the resentment of “classically trained” musicians when you encroach on their turf (I teach blues, jazz, rock, Celtic, folk, Beatles, etc without the benefit of an advanced degree at the Fine Arts Building, a bastion of conservative musical thinking), I lift my hat to David Bloom for having succeeded at establishing himself as a successful teacher.
Also, Mr. Bloom’s dogmatic and narrow concept of music bothers me. Music is an ocean, not a private pool. The last thing we need in this new century is another generation of jazz snobs who share a fundamentally conservative view that all good music has already happened and new things are to be treated with contempt. That kind of calcified thinking yields nothing but deafness to the strange, the “incorrect,” and the new. Jazz music represents no more than 2 percent of the market share in America today. The people that consume the other 98 percent are not all wrong. There are many wonders and truths to be found in folk, pop, rock, blues, country, and yes, even (especially?) hip-hop music. Anybody who claims that theirs is the only way to the truth is exaggerating their own importance.
