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When did jazz lose touch with today’s youth, and how can it reclaim some of its glory from hip hop and its children: dancehall and reggaeton.

Ushered into the concert halls and auditoriums of academia and now deemed a higher art form, jazz has lost touch with the voice of the inner city youth. More than the price of a movie ticket, an mp3 download and that latest 50 — Jada dis tape combined, jazz has priced itself out of the pockets of today’s youth and placed itself amongst the dusty company of Beethoven and Bach, only to be passing tunes heard as ambiance in thousands of Starbucks’ across America. Relegated to be the theme music of late night quiet storms, it’s time for jazz to show off her musical children and that old dogs definitely can master new tricks.

How many times can one listen to yet another reinterpretation of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps? As revolutionary as Coltrane was to expanding jazz’s potential, I think he too would be saddened to see how stagnant the music has become. What made it unique was the music’s ability to always bring something new and its ever evolving nature allowed the youth to feel ownership of the music. To revitalize jazz, this evolution must happen again. Jazz must extend its hand out to hip hop.

Jazz needs to recapture the spirit of community that it once created. With one jazz record, you could start a party, make love, and then be inspired to revolution. Caught in the time warp of nostalgia, those who grew up along side of jazz’s heyday, have become the loudest critics of jazz’s inevitable evolution. The genius of a Charlie Parker, a Miles Davis or of a John Coltrane, meant the boundaries of what was normal had to be flung out of the window. Spitting in the face of swing music and commercial success, these artists took a risk — mixing a bit of the old school with their youthful exuberance and struck gold. These musical giants showed that going your own way could pay off. Faced with extinction, jazz must open its eyes, clean out its ears and learn from hip hop.

Hip hop is the music of the masses. Born out of the basement parties in the Bronx, it is following the path laid long ago by jazz — giving Black and Latino youths a forum to express their frustrations with the system in a creative way before suburban America got hip to it. Now embraced by mainstream pop stations as the music to know, it too has lost its substance, that special something that made it alluring as well as taboo. As hip hop reaches towards its thirtieth birthday, exchanging its baggy pants and t-shirts for button downs and slacks, sampling from songs that previously sampled from something else, hip hop seems to be at a standstill — experiencing its own mid-life crisis alongside jazz.

The answer to both genres’ woes is in collaboration. Following Jay-Z’s example of mixing it up between himself and the Roots for his unplugged album, or with Linkin Park to take The Black Album to another level, an artist can stay true to the genre that made him and attract a new audience by stepping outside of the box. As much criticism as Miles Davis received when he began incorporating funk and electronic music in jazz, straying from the tried and true, he had a goal in mind — he wanted to see more young people attend his concerts. As vain as this move seemed to his contemporaries, Miles was indeed a visionary; he knew that a new audience must be cultivated, and the best way to attract them was to incorporate a bit of their sound with his own. It was a perfect opportunity to expose these new fans to jazz without them feeling alienated.

This same action must happen again. If Roy Hargrove, a member of the Hip Hop Generation, was able to bridge the gap between jazz and hip hop by collaborating with Q-Tip and Common on his album RH Factor, What would be the impact of a living legend like Wynton Marsalis to play while Jay-Z flowed on the beat? I’d pay to see it, wouldn’t you?

Image by Damian Rafferty