A huge percentage of the new albums they launch on the marketplace are carefully studied retro affairs, fed on nostalgia and an implicit assumption that the best young singers are those with the closest mimicry of old school attitudes and repertoire. These efforts do little to enliven the art form, but have contributed to a view, among some in the general public, that jazz is an old-fashioned kind of music. But even more egregious are shallow attempts to repackage jazz as a glitzy glamour-fed lifestyle product—an unpromising recipe for a genre whose best practitioners have typically resisted
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