What’s the use?
I’ve been thinking about this quote since I read it, and trying to figure out why it so grates me. Obviously part of it is it is poking (semi-gentle) fun at an art form I love.
But more important, I think, is it lumps singing a jazz standard alongside two exceedingly niche hobbies – speaking a language that is rapidly becoming almost no one’s first language, and manipulating a machine made obsolete by the personal computer. In both cases, taking up the hobby in 2019 must be self-consciously retro.
I agree that singing jazz music is niche, but it’s also an important cultural artifact. Alice Parker has called the jazz standards repertoire “American Lied”, and I don’t get the sense that the author would lump learning Schubert lieder or Beethoven piano sonatas alongside Yiddish and letterpress.
On the other hand, there is, in the gentle ribbing, an assumption that the value of an art is related to its reach. In this mindset, learning to nail a perfectly crafted pop song is much more valuable than “learning to sell a jazz standard” (note that word, “sell”), at least in part because it’s more commercially viable.
It makes me sad that that is in the background for how we assess the value of an art form. In the middle of a beautiful piece about an aging legend passing on her knowledge, this one sentence delivers so much disappointment about the state of our culture.