The mining of jazz’s legacy continues to bring new treasures to the surface, to the benefit of aficionados, entrepreneurs and, one hopes, the artists themselves; but are the voices of new artists at risk of being drowned out by the continuing chorus of wonderful music echoing ever louder from the music’s past? Kind Of Blue is reported to still be selling 5000 copies a week, while sales figures of 500 in a week are above average for a new jazz release, and rare indeed for a new UK jazz release. The growth of streaming continues to change the way that music is consumed, and this column has already discussed the way that jazz artists have often been ill-served by the change as the revenue from streaming is often inadequate to compensate for the fall in those hitherto all-important CD sales at gigs. Yet the news is not all bad, as a couple of examples illustrate. In their capacity as a label, multi-tasking new-jazz svengalis Jazz Re:freshed were able to capitalise on the media attention around Nubya Garcia, and their own understanding of the fan demographic for the scene she’s been chosen to figurehead, and by presenting her debut album on vinyl they’ve managed to sell out two pressings; now the reissue on CD has sold out as well. Meanwhile young traditionalist Gabriel Latchin has scored over two and a half million Spotify streams of his recording of Polka Dots And Moonbeams via the ‘Coffee Table Jazz’ playlist. Is it unfair to suggest that jazz artists are more than usually susceptible to adopting an attitude of cynical fatalism towards the business, when a willingness to investigate new models of monetisation might serve them better?

With this in mind, let’s turn the focus on to the way that UK jazz is making its way through the hazardous waters between the Scylla of media incomprehension and the Charybdis of audience apathy. This column started, believe it or not, in 2013, and ever since then we’ve been privileged to document the genuine flourishing of a scene of young players, largely but by no means exclusively London- based, who have worked to carve out a distinctive take on the jazz tradition, and whose freshness, energy and personal charisma has been rewarded with a great deal of media attention and a dedicated and youthful fanbase. The scene has been supported by media and industry alike (our New Generation Jazz program, with the generous support of the Arts Council, has played its own small part), and this has, alas, not been uniformly appreciated. As in Newtonian physics, so in the music biz; every action sets up an inevitable reaction, and there have been muted but persistent voices from within the community claiming that the spotlight that has shone so brightly on some artists has cast others, more musically deserving but less charismatic or sellable, into the shadows. Of course, the music biz is never just about music, and culture is about more than the execution of art. For jazz to appeal beyond its loyal core following of mature connoisseurs into a broader, younger, more diverse demographic, it needs to be populated with characters that reflect that demographic. As a result, some players may be foregrounded before their talents are fully developed, but let us remember that jazz is a long game and that posterity will be the judge. Much of the initial excitement around what we’ll call the New London Scene was generated before there was much in the way of recorded material or audience figures beyond the artist’s own manor – how is the scene delivering on its promise?