Washington continues to amaze me musically. Two weeks ago it was a phenomenal performance at Bohemian Caverns by local musicians Allyn Johnson and Divine Order. This past Thursday, it was unexpectedly encountering gifted harmonica player Frederic Yonnet at the Holiday Inn. I stopped in after work at the hotel’s bar, the 21st Amendment, which features jazz on Thursdays and Fridays. I first heard Yonnet last March when he performed onstage with Prince in L.A. What a surprise it was to see him performing in the small lounge of a hotel across the street from where I now work.

These recent experiences got me thinking about jazz, the current music scene and my own experiences with Gemini Soul. Pianist Marcus Johnson regularly appears at 21st Amendment. His latest album debuted at #10 on the Billboard jazz chart. A week ago I heard jazz trumpeter Jeremy Pelt at Bohemian Caverns. He has an international reputation, yet the crowd was small, mainly family and friends of the band. And here was Yonnet, who has appeared onstage with Prince, with just a handful of people grooving to his music.

So if this array of prominent, talented musicians can attract just a small coterie to their performances, is music doomed? When I think about the cost of promoting Gemini Soul when we toured in the fall of 2007, and how we drew audiences about the same size as the ones at Bohemian Caverns — or how we drew more people at Hotel De Anza than Yonnet at the Holiday Inn — I can’t imagine these jazz musicians are earning a sufficient living from performing alone. It also makes me appreciate in retrospect how much we accomplished as a band. I give these guys credit for persevering in the face of such “limited” rewards. Renown and acclaim are great, but they don’t pay the bills. Nor do they, apparently, create legions of fans eager to flock to your performances. And that is what I find most disheartening about all this — the music business, the current state of this homegrown art form known as jazz.

We take music for granted in our culture. We don’t sufficiently value it. It’s ubiquitous, so we don’t seem to want to pay for it. We think of it like the air we breathe, and we wouldn’t expect to pay for air. Oh, sure, we value celebrities, anyone who’s famous enough. But we eliminate music from K-12 curriculum, even though music training has been shown to improve mathematical and analytical skills in children. Perhaps it’s part of a larger cultural shift. We’re starting to expect everything should be free. The majority of Californians don’t want to support the true cost of education through higher taxes, even though education is probably our most important enterprise. The problem with jazz, then, is the problem with our society. And if we don’t relearn how to show respect, we will lose not just music, but everything.