"The recording industry has changed; they're enjoying such incredible success in the pop field"
About this Quote
A jazz lifer saying this isn’t applauding pop’s rise so much as taking a clear-eyed inventory of who’s winning the room. When Gerry Mulligan notes that “the recording industry has changed,” the second clause lands with a faint wince: “they’re enjoying such incredible success in the pop field.” The “they” is doing quiet work here, implying a shift in allegiance away from musicians like him and toward a market logic that prizes immediacy, image, and mass reproducibility. It’s not a moral rant; it’s the cool, slightly bruised realism of someone who watched the center of gravity move.
Mulligan came up when labels could still treat jazz as a flagship product and musicians as long-term investments. By the time he’s talking like this, the industry is consolidating, radio formatting is tightening, MTV-era promotion is rewriting what “success” even looks like, and the LP-as-art object is increasingly subordinate to chart velocity. Jazz isn’t just competing with pop; it’s being reclassified from mainstream culture to “niche,” a polite term that often means smaller budgets, fewer risks, shorter attention spans.
The line works because it’s both descriptive and defensive. Mulligan doesn’t deny pop’s achievement; he frames it as the industry’s achievement, not necessarily the music’s. Subtext: if pop is “incredible success,” that success is partially engineered - by marketing infrastructure, distribution power, and corporate appetite - rather than earned solely in the bandstand crucible he trusts. It’s a musician clocking a new scoreboard, and refusing to pretend it’s the same game.
Mulligan came up when labels could still treat jazz as a flagship product and musicians as long-term investments. By the time he’s talking like this, the industry is consolidating, radio formatting is tightening, MTV-era promotion is rewriting what “success” even looks like, and the LP-as-art object is increasingly subordinate to chart velocity. Jazz isn’t just competing with pop; it’s being reclassified from mainstream culture to “niche,” a polite term that often means smaller budgets, fewer risks, shorter attention spans.
The line works because it’s both descriptive and defensive. Mulligan doesn’t deny pop’s achievement; he frames it as the industry’s achievement, not necessarily the music’s. Subtext: if pop is “incredible success,” that success is partially engineered - by marketing infrastructure, distribution power, and corporate appetite - rather than earned solely in the bandstand crucible he trusts. It’s a musician clocking a new scoreboard, and refusing to pretend it’s the same game.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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