AI can benefit any human - artist, business owner, academic, athlete, family - and solutions, policy and regulation will be implemented to benefit and standardize safe and equitable utilization and utility for all. From providing off-grid electricity and internet to impoverished nations, to the business infrastructure that individuals have access to, now is your chance to learn and understand AI as it relates to the Jazz musician.
Before we dive into the promising realities that AI holds for you if you are a Jazz musician, look at Jazz from a few reference points.
Jazz as a Profound Global and Human Art Form Bridging Cultures and Rewriting Standards
Jazz is a highly potent global and deeply human art form that has historically bridged gaps of culture. At its highest levels, it represents universal truths and unending human accomplishment and potential. Jazz stands for the unity of the world and embodies global cultural comprehension of universal spiritual, moral, and humanistic values.
"Jazz is not just music; it's a way of life, a way of being, a way of thinking." – Nina Simone
Jazz as an Integral Part of American and World History
Jazz is an integral part not of one heritage, but of American history, and American history, like all else, is global history—the history of the world. Without understanding our past not as a race, not as a nation, but as humans, all humanity suffers.
"If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go." – James Baldwin
The Global Influence of the Jazz Industry on Hearts and Minds
Jazz is an industry that affects the perceptions and hearts of people around the world. It offers a lens into the current state of human existence, allowing us to perceive the greatness of human accomplishment and its relevance to what is happening right now.
"Music is the universal language that brings people closer together." – Ella Fitzgerald
Jazz as the First Hyper-Globalized Medium and Beacon of Excellence Amid Adversity
Jazz became the first hyper-globalized medium of music and high-performance art in the face of adversity, setting a standard of excellence around the world. Despite suppression and marginalization, jazz artists traveled the globe, embodying resilience and innovation.
"The true beauty of music is that it connects people." – Roy Ayers
The "Jazz Standard" – A Universal Benchmark of Human Potential
Jazz is one of the most original industries and one of America's finest products, setting a universalized standard of comprehension and human potential for people around the globe—a benchmark we call the "Jazz Standard." Like the greatest artworks and literature, jazz offers profound understanding of the world and has the power to change lives forever.
"Jazz is freedom. You think about that." – Thelonious Monk
Jazz as a Significant Industry and Pillar of Human Achievement
Jazz is not just an art form; it is an industry with substantial economic and cultural influence. It stands as one of the modern world's champions, contributing to global artistic landscapes and promoting human accomplishment. Jazz embodies sovereign equality; without it, the whole world is suppressed.
"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." – Maya Angelou
The Emergence of Hip-Hop from the Jazz Standard Amid Marginalization
The Hip-Hop industry was birthed out of the Jazz Standard due to brutal and persistent efforts to marginalize and destroy leadership in communities, affecting not just minorities but the entire quality of life associated with the Jazz Standard. This shift illustrates how cultural expressions evolve in response to social pressures.
"Art is a form of expression that transcends all boundaries." – Lena Horne
The Cultural Aftermath and Acceptance of Mediocrity
Culture born out of the destruction of the Jazz Standard led to the acceptance of mediocrity and a diluted respect for the high arts. Commercial industries and media conglomerates deliberately established an industry that catered to the commoditization of attention by any means possible, regardless of its human impact. This represents a degeneration of humanity.
"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth." – John F. Kennedy
Exploitation and the Proliferation of Oppression as Entertainment
The pursuit of quick money through the exploitation of people led to a cultural environment where suffering is commodified, with oppressed humans struggling for entertainment. This is a human iniquity—a war of perception fueled by surveillance and control that feels like freedom and entertainment.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Quadruple Standards and the Complexity of Overcoming Systemic Hurdles
This led to quadruple standards: media and governments operating in layers of agendas, creating conflicting opinions and standards that obscure truth and hinder understanding. When an art form is created by a group that is simultaneously marginalized and celebrated, it leads to complex perceptions impacting human relations and societal understanding.
One hurdle leads to the next, and people become judgmental, especially when these hurdles involve overcoming generational dysfunction and systemic beliefs that reveal uncomfortable fallacies and human iniquities. These challenges are tense with anger, hate, pain, violence, concerns about safety, and the divide between the haves and have-nots.
"The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated." – James Baldwin
Questioning Societal Standards and the Marginalization of Great Human Achievements
The continuation of global, social, and media-based norms without the rampant success of jazz and its rightful place in history included in corporate and educational infrastructures is unhealthy for humanity around the world. It creates a lack of understanding of the world's history and allows corporations and media outlets to push a narrative of a manufactured struggle.
Oppressing great humans who contribute profoundly to global culture raises critical questions about the values and standards of society. To create a myopic understanding of human accomplishment through suppression is to destroy and end history and humanity as we know it. This is a degeneration of humanity, built on human iniquity, and we must reflect on the implications of such actions.
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." – Maya Angelou
What you are about to read needs to be read in full to understand the full thought:
Industries are traditionally built by humans.
Humans build industries to create opportunity.
Industries are competitive.
In believing we connect by tapping screens made by hyper-competitive industries like tech, we volunteer to mute our own voices, and minimize our human actions and interactions to thumbs and clicks, mistaking the illusion of belonging to the whole for true, deep individualistic human expression.
This not as an attack on technology, in any way shape or form, and the point is that on the other side of tech usage is immense opportunity.
You may be someone who already has put this into perspective, and as a result, is anti-AI and anti-tech.
You are judging the book by its cover.
Here’s why:
AI technology is the new iPhone, the new Facebook, the new Internet, the new genre.
As we witness this novel technology become adopted by businesses and people - just like social media and data exchange - policy and regulation will be implemented.
One person will end up avoiding and disliking AI for the rest of their lives, while it is basically a part of everything that they do, whether they know it or not.
Another person will have been on the other side of the learning curve, leveraging AI, with the confidence and understanding that their fears and concerns about AI will actually be alleviated, and solutions will become standardized and institutionalized as people become more familiar with it.
Kind of like Jazz.
AI has already transformed business landscape, next is, the political landscape, and afterwards, it will be a part of our daily lives, and its positive utility will be immense and permanent to those who understood it.
Now, if Jazz is an industry, and the entire industrial landscape of the world will end up benefiting from AI, what happens when we don’t use it?
Actually, as artists who don’t require technology to make art, our product and ideal vehicle of survival this works highly in our favor.
The problem is that your artistry is suppressed by a gap.
That gap is that most people work for businesses, therefore, they have adopted AI, and it doesn’t just provide efficiency to their professional lives, but their personal lives, social circles, financial status, personal productivity and overall well being.
As a Jazz musician whose technologies are scales, longtones and sightreading or playing by ear, you end up becoming outcompeted and your selective focus on how to use technology, what is possible, what is scary or not scary like AI, is ultimately placing behind the curve of the average human being adopting modern technology, including AI.
Serious jazz music will become attractive and appealing by way of the adoption of modern business practices and by maturity by 2030, because people will value that it is organic and irreplaceable. However, since artists aren’t as productive and are renting their time out to digital technology without understanding the reality of the landscape, it will reflect in the creative output of their music, and the audience will end up looking for something that resonates with the times.
What do AI and Jazz Musicians Have To Do With Each Other?
One may argue that Jazz music and its value lies in the fact that it doesn’t need technology. The answer is that Jazz doesn’t need technology, but you do.
Jazz is a prestigious, dominant, high standards ancestor of all popular music and human accomplishment, with better musicians and highly credible, legendary, gargantuan figures throughout the history of the earth. A large majority of jazz’s academia is built on the foundations of the music of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky and countless other pivotal figures who have facilitated timeless cultural standards.
All Jazz musicians are inspired by universal human truths and the greatness of nearly infinite human potential in creativity, resilience, harmony, dissonance and possibility both on and off of the bandstand.
Our industry lies not only in performance and practice, but in the ideals and opportunities that we create as individuals. This is not easy when your most pivotal, prominent figures in an industry have departed from the planet, and the culture has become standardized and institutionalized.
It is not a war against the institutions or industry of Jazz, rather, it is up to us to build the narrative that incites the industry and institutions to adapt to our needs in the modern world, where we are deprived of the technological use cases and advances that our the industrial landscape of the world is moving towards.
The veil is lifted when you understand that you are renting your time out to a competitive industry by using the competitive industry’s devices, and that by understanding AI, you are able to understand your competitor.
Jazz will ultimately destroy and heal TikTok brain, doomscrolling and will likely be reintroduced to the mainstream through humanity’s inevitable search for meaning and depth.
There will be a small amount of Jazz musicians who deserve the attention for their work by way of the level of artistry that they have accomplished.
Musically, it will make sense musically and reflect in their work and humanity, and a screen will not be able to standardize their accomplishments among the endless drowning noise of entertainment and artificial dopamine, short-term meaningless happiness that flies away moments after you turn your screen off.
Because of societal pressures, and the nature of Jazz music being a push for marginalized humans to survive and create opportunity, much like any other industry, few musicians will rise to the point of convergence between modern industry, and unseen opportunity.
Given the all-encompassing nature of the music and human accomplishment, it would be a massive societal error for the content that the majority consumes to be controlled and distributed by a small group of firms: record labels, media conglomerates and financial institutions.
Those firms have already become unthinkably powerful, they will inevitably lose that power to the artist and this would lead to the greatest expansion of creative power the world has ever known.
AI is the perfect example of this happening. AI technology is a modern innovation, its construction is improvised, and contains creative constraints, just like Jazz. As a matter of fact, this is the nature of any business, industry, service or human endeavor.
There will be a shift from global, constant, persistent surveillance via social media algorithms and the consumption of content, to a creative renaissance which connects people to each other and their highest ideals through art, music, technology, service, a necessity for human interaction, and ultimately, entrepreneurship will be highly valued by those who have an understanding of this.
We must ensure we take the pathway towards a flourishing, supportive infrastructure competitive to the corporate world and its laborers who are also using technology.
The beauty in the situation is that ALL people with an internet connection have access to highly powerful AI technologies that can be used to build solutions that increase productivity, time efficiency, synthesize creative perspectives that you may not have had otherwise, and ultimately increase your potential to earn by leading a life built on independent and individualistic needs.
Very soon in the future, most humans online will have produced content generated, synthesized or distributed by AI, and might not even know it.
Corporations will push out AI content and expand the advertising budgets. These advertising budgets are the only ways that social media gets paid. They don’t care about your engagement rate, or if you are consuming poison, rather, they just need to pay their corporate clients returns on the corporate client’s advertising budgets, primarily to stay in business and keep the industry alive.
This means that since you have access to the same AI that the corporations do, AI can help you build your own brand and generate a ton of attention to yourself and your music, and you don’t have to do this with advertising, it can be done for free.
An economy for Jazz musicians built on AI would allow all of the benefits of productive content generation and attention building systems that corporations benefit from. Here is the modern gateway and vision into the competitive industry that battles for the modern consumer to be exposed to something, anything.
In your case, the ideal would be music.
An informed push of Jazz musicians properly using AI can change the world.