Jazz Ain’t Dead. It’s Just Outta Reach

 Miles Davis said jazz is dead. A bold statement, but I get it. He wasn’t burying the sound, he was eulogizing the space it once had. Not the horn, the swing, or the improvisation, but the room Black folks carved out in a world built to erase us. That space got swallowed by commodification. By white-washed museums and sleepy cocktail lounges. So when Davis said jazz is dead, maybe he meant: y’all killed it.

And that’s the same type of death Wilderson talks about, social death. A living body with no place to belong. A body denied its humanity not by accident, but by design. Jazz, like the Black bodies that birthed it, sits outside the gate of mainstream relevance now. Once it stopped being profitable, it stopped being visible. That’s nonrelationality. That’s Afropessimism.

Henry Dumas knew something about this kind of death. In “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” we walk into a world where that circle, the bond between Blackness and belonging, is broken. Not gently cracked. Shattered. The people inside the circle are left with nothing but their own echoes, no bridge to cross over, no audience clapping on the other side. That’s not just fiction, it’s a metaphor for the state of jazz. You’ve got an art form born in resistance, shaped in the hush of survival, and now, it’s either erased or exoticized. It’s trapped in a museum glass case or used as ambiance in a bougie hotel lobby where not one person in the room could tell you who Mingus was.

So yeah, in this system, jazz is dead. Not because it stopped breathing, but because no one sees it breathing anymore.

But then comes Fred Moten with his Black optimism. And I’ll be honest, I’m still wrestling with it. There’s part of me that wants to hold onto Wilderson’s rage, the clarity of calling out that nothing’s changed. But then Moten’s voice cuts through like a bassline in a dim room: Even in the margins, we find ways to create. To live. To groove.

And that makes me think… maybe jazz didn’t die. Maybe it dipped. Maybe it left the party and started a new one on the block. Maybe it said, “If y’all can’t handle me, I’ll just exist without your permission.”

Jazz today still exists, in jam sessions, in experimental noise, in trap beats laced with Coltrane samples. It’s alive where the mainstream ain’t looking. It’s whispering to us in the underground. That’s refusal. That’s resistance. That’s what Moten’s talking about.

So let’s go back to Dumas. That broken circle? Maybe it doesn’t close, but it still pulses. Maybe the point isn’t to re-enter the white world of acceptance, but to dance on the outside. Maybe jazz, in its “death,” has become even more alive, just not in ways the dominant culture can commodify. It’s free. It’s unreachable. And maybe that’s the most alive it can be.

Jazz isn’t dead. It’s just in a different register now. If you can’t hear it, maybe it’s not jazz that’s the problem. Maybe it’s your ears.