Well here it is, almost Jazz Festival time and once again the Vancouver jazz community is asking itself the perennial question: "Why the hell can't we sell any records?" You know what I'm talking about. You've visited the jazz section in the local record store. It's full of grey-bearded, 45-year-old bachelors in cardigan sweaters who live with their mothers, and intense young Cap College students transcribing Pat Metheny guitar solos at the free listening station. These people don't spend any money, for chrissakes. Where's the art-house crowd, those people who go to Atom Egoyan movies? Where's the Commercial Drive set, the skateboarders, the white-kids-with-dreadlocks? Where's the youth demographic?

Sometimes it seems to me that there are two types of jazz festivals in the world. There are those that deliberately distance themselves from jazz "tradition," that see jazz at the end of the 20th Century as a world-wide musical form, and align themselves with contemporary European art music's notions of radical experimentalism and a rejection of past styles. These festivals tend to book a lot of European improvisers-musicians at home in the great concert halls of Europe, who see jazz as primarily an art music, cerebral in nature, and largely divorced from show business and entertainment.

And then there is New Orleans, where music is a part of life.