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?

How is it that within my lifetime jazz has become... unhip? This is a serious turn of events. As a child, during the crucial formative years of around 8 to 12, the years when young males form the template for what they consider cool, jazz was the sound track. Lee Marvin in "M" Squad had the perfect accompaniment in Count Basie's swaggering theme song. Peter Gunn had Henry Mancini. Rock 'n' roll was around, but those were the days of Frankie Avalon and Fabian and the music only vaguely registered on my consciousness as a sort of background hum of "surfs up" and "let's twist" and the pain-in-the-ass teenaged older brothers of my friends. Jazz was about an adult world of men in sharp suits and Women in nylons drinking cocktails, a world I assumed I would one day join (how was I to know it would shortly be washed away in a paisley day-glow holocaust, only to be resurrected 30 years later as the lame-ass "retro" Cocktail Nation?). It didn't hurt that my father owned copies of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Working With the Miles Davis quintet. I mean, Miles. My God, the cars, the suits, the women, the arrogance. What 12-year-old boy wouldn't be impressed? And the beauty part was that as I grew older I was able to see past these superficial elements and appreciate the artistry underneath-the emotional depth the rich and eloquent vocabulary of expression. Jazz can grow up with you, and you can learn to appreciate and understand those elements within it which are incomprehensible to the very young. And yet it retains the initial flash and excitement and glamour that attracted you in the first place.

So how is it that here, at the beginning of the 21st Century. it has come to this, that jazz is perceived by the media and the general public as the preserve of that pathetic social archetype, the "Jazz Nerd"? The answer came to me in a flash the other day.

I was perusing the newspaper and tripped over a piece about Vancouver Sun staffer John Armstrong's B.C. Book Prize nomination for his memoir on the '80s West Coast punk scene, Guilty of Everything. Here you had a book about drugs and booze and bad behaviour and a style of music that had its heyday 25 years ago (by the '80s, punk wasn't exactly cutting edge anymore). And it was still hip! What's more, Armstrong himself, who is - let's face it-no spring chicken, managed to reinforce his street cred by falling backward in his chair, hitting the floor, and sending his dessert plate flying across the room (this according to the Globe and Mail's Alexandra Gill). "This is it!" I thought, "This is why people think jazz is boring!"

It would seem that after all these years of trying to make jazz respectable, to have it accepted as true "Art Music" by the Academy, we have succeeded, perhaps too well. You only have to look at how the music is taught at "jazz-friendly" universities. The curriculum follows the same pattern as that given to the classical nerdlets, except instead of theory and counterpoint you have Jazz Theory and Jazz Arranging. Just as any classical clarinet student is at some point going to have to deal with that damned Mozart Clarinet Concerto (K581), so the student of jazz tenor saxophone is doomed to wrestle with John Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps. All of this studiousness leaves little time for drug and spousal abuse, or for developing "attitude." The resulting graduate is as boring and unmarketable as his or her classical counterpart, with record sales to match.

People, this just will not do. I refuse to see the music I have devoted my professional and creative life to dismissed as... academic. Admittedly, this is partially the fault of some of jazz's major figures, who seem to have devoted large amounts of time to the study and practice of, well, music, rather than working on their badboy act. It is rather difficult to imagine Duke Ellington trashing a hotel room or John Coltrane urinating in a nightclub patron's drink. But the fact is, jazz has had some major players who make the average punk-rocker look like a Presbyterian minister. You wanna talk protean heroin abuse, try Charlie Parker. In fact, I think Parker probably takes the cake in just about any area of excess including promiscuity, alcohol, food, and let's not forget his famous "pissing in the phone booth" routine in a Detroit nightclub. For arrogant wife-beaters of course you have Miles. For psychotic nutbars you have any number of examples, from pianist Dodo Marmarosa, who once moved every stick of his roommate's furniture out into the street because it was "bugging the sound of the piano, man" to Charles Mingus' reduction of his bass to firewood in a fit of pique.

Even the independent record release, supposedly a creature of the punk-rock movement, was done first by a local jazzer. I have in my record collection a copy from the original print run of Fraser Mcpherson's first album, Live at the Planetarium. It was actually recorded live for French CBC. Fraser bought the masters, pressed a thousand copies, and released it himself on West End Records. The address on the album sleeve for West End Records is #1604 -1975 Pacific St., which of course was his apartment for many years until his death in 1993. The album was released in 1975, when The Ramones were still an unknown garage band in Queens. Fraser didn't sign a long-term contract with a label (Concord) until four years later, and even then it was only a distribution deal. He supplied the finished product. "Frazz" was fiercely independent and didn't want record companies telling him what to record. He used to sit with me at the bar of the old Rembrandt Lounge on Davie Street and construct elaborate (and hilarious) scenarios of the sorts of things they might pressure him into, albums like Fraser McPherson Plays for Lovers or Surfin' with Frazz (with him on the cover in baggies holding a surfboard). We both agreed that one great thing about jazz was that we would never have to endure an album-cover photo of Dizzy Gillespie in a thong. I'm not sure what he would make of Diana Krall's latest.

So there you have it, folks. Anything those upstart punkers were up to in the '80s, we jazz types did it first. What's more, we did it better and we did more of it (take that, John Armstrong, and the dessert plate you rode in on). The only problem is, a lot of us have gotten too old to do it anymore, and the rest are dead. So in the interest of livening things up on the publicity front, I recently suggested to my wife that a series of well-publicized affairs with young fashion models, and perhaps a drunk driving arrest with one in the car, might increase my profile, media-wise (I do have a record coming out this spring). Then she, upon being informed of these indiscretions, could break a plate over my head at a charity dinner. For some reason she is unenthusiastic about this idea, except for the bit with the plate. Go figure.