Urban Knights? Ramsey Lewis's work? Jazz Funk? THAT's modern jazz, not Sun Ra or Metheny. Modern jazz influences pop through George Duke as a producer, CHick Corea, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, etc. FUnk started out as JAZZ FUNK.

The telling problem here is that only one post discussed hip hop, and missed the biggest hiphop/rap collaboration of all time: US3's FlipFlop Fantasia/Cantaloop, set to Herbie Hancock's Cantaloop Island. A number of jazz artists collaborate with popsters.

For the old stuff, yes, you have limited audience. For modal jazz, no audience. It is inaccessible, and nothing will change that. The argument is instrumental versus vocal, not jazz versus rock. Jazz and Rock have inflormed each other for years.

There is no shame in listening to accessible stuff. Dizzy Gillespie's After Hours is excellent, and I have it in my car on a mix CD, nect to Tipitina and Babyface's Two Occassions. On the Up from Urban Knights fits nicely next to Anita Baker (she's not jazz influenced) and Alicia Keys.

Broaden your horizons. Look for post 1965 jazz funk and jazz/r&b. Chrissette Michele is hardcore 1960s jazz with scatting on "Let's Rock". But the snobs here will never look at her.

For all of the dick wagging here, most people just don't know that much about modern jazz. That's sad. At least watch Ramsey Lewis's show on Youtube. I've cringed through this whole thread.

Even though this article refers to a recent event (Hancock's recent Grammy win), this article could've been written 40 years ago. The great experimentation of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan? Sure, but what about Ken Vandermark and Animal Collective? Listen to Matthew Shipp's collaborations with the Anti-pop Consortium or what members of Sonic Youth get up to with William Hooker when they get a chance.

The truth of the matter is that what has marginalized jazz is an excess of veneration, the steep ticket prices for admission to the Great Jazz Museum. The edgy experimentalists and dedicated booty shakers in the jazz world love their Davis, Coltrane and Coleman, but they've decided to stake out their own territory, too, though you wouldn't know it from listening to 'jazz purists.'

Similarly, experimentation in rock has led in all sorts of new directions, and is much that is both complex and improvisational to be found on the cutting edge.

The truth is that rock and jazz as terms have begun to seem a little passe in these deliriously post-modern times, and I suspect that the walls keeping them apart are propped up by the aging establishment, to which I fear Mr. Kamiya belongs.

I think point missing is that a lot of jazz of the 1960s was heavily tied to the Civil Rights Movement. Lots of musicians, may of whom experienced discrimination first hand while trying to work, funneled their outrage and anger and frustration and sadness into their music. The results were often nothing less than stunning. I'm black with black parents who played a lot of this stuff -- and also Beatles and Stones and Ravi Shankar and Stravinsky -- so maybe I was exposed to this sort of stuff more.

As a teenaged Rock fan I bought a few Jazz albums, MIngus and Coltrane, but couldn't get into them. Ten years later getting a little bored of Rock, they're finally growing on me!

A previous poster, obviously MUCH better versed in Jazz than I, said "Jazz died in 1960" or words to that effect. As a newcomer to Jazz I was hoping it would last a few years more than that, but basically so far I have to agree.

Jazz is dead. And so is Rock. It died with Kurt Cobain. Anyone musician who devotes themselves to either exclusively is essentially a modern day Folkie.

The only trouble is unlike Jazz replacing Rock, nothing has jumped in to replace Rock.

Except 100% commercially driven aural shite. Music for kids, 10 times worse than any early Beatles tune.

As a 27 year old, having grown bored with Rock and Blues after 10 years or so, all I can say is thank fuck for Jazz. Even if it is dead. (If this thing had smilies I'd insert one here)

...I am no aficionado here but I'm listening. However, I do remember one wonderfully exuberant Italian-American, Arturo P. who studied among the finest in Europe yet taught violin to musically-challenged 9-year olds in the empty classrooms of St Leo's High on Saturday afternoons in the late forties.

I played my violin like one who was learning to saw a two-by-four in half,for the first time. I never improved but it was one compassionate Arturo who would relieve me of my painful scraping; borrow my 3/4 size violin and play something strange and wonderful I had never heard before.

My grateful fiddle sang for him as it never would for me. It was not Stephane Grappelli but it tuned me in to another world, so when later I found an early vinyl of Don Shirley in a Goodwill discount bin, my love began again; went on from there.

It was the sounds coming from a candle and paraphenalia shop in the 70's when Ellen Mcllwaine 'introduced' herself; her sounds coming bold and brassy above the scents of cheap incense.

Finding Professor Longhair followed after.

Or maybe I should go back a few years earlier - mid-fifties now - and give my primary respect to the alto sax who melted the neon and turned oily puddles in the gutters into mosaic abstracts, on the corner by Shindlers News Stand, downtown Hennepin Avenue, Somewhere USA.

You could say, a cold March day was transformed, tuned into diametrically imposed street theatre by one man in a battered army coat...was it the blues; was it jazz? All I remember is it turned one drab street scene into people-on-the-go, pacing, spacing to those gentle notes; moving to the flow of one alto sax...sometimes I recall, and I'm still listening.

Rock 'n' Roll's parents are the Blues and Country. Jazz is/was a different genre entirely.

Far removed from the glitzy, glamorous big-city jazz clubs of the early-to-mid 20th century, Rock was born out of dirty blues riffs and country-fried harmonies in podunk dirt-floored Southern bar shacks. And to this day, jazz is automatically accorded a level of "establishment" respectability that rock & roll will never earn from the music aficionado.

And ya know what? That's absolutely fine. I like jazz well enough (and I can listen to Miles Davis for hours on end) but my musical passion will always be for rock. The ubiquitous theme of rebellion against the status quo which weaves through every generation in the genre - from Les Paul to the Stones to the Ramones to Green Day - ensures that rock & roll, like Neil Young said, will never die.

Jazz and rock - different? Sure. One better or worse than the other? Relativism, baby.