One of the truly spectacular perks of my apartment complex here in Alexandria is this free shuttle that comes to pick me up right outside my door, and drops me off at the Metro station over at Pentagon City. (Yes, it is just as surreal as it sounds -- replete with commuters who head to work every morning dressed in full combat fatigues, presumably because the camo helps them hide from their bosses in the copy room.)
In the evenings, I'll occasionally need to stay in the city later than the last shuttle home, leaving me no choice but to take a cab. But in general, given the traffic nightmare that is the Beltway and the complete dearth of parking at any of the stations, I really have no reason to complain.
Well, except one.
The shuttle bus' radio is permanently set on Washington's own WJZW, aka "Smooth Jazz 105.9." As a long-time bop aficionado, it would be quite an understatement to declare I've never been a fan of so-called "smooth" jazz, that antiseptic aural pablum whose most endearing legacy has been succeeding in the seemingly incomprehensible task of making dentists' offices even more dreadful places than they were before.
To give a sense of how artistically bereft the genre has been, one need ponder only this: While Shaquille O'Neal was mostly laughed off in his attempt to become a rapper, former Sacramento Kings forward Wayman Tisdale plays bass with a smooth combo called the Fifth Quarter (ya'geddit?!?) ...and fans of this slop actually seem to lap it up.
But I digress.
At first, I made a concerted effort to try to drown out the cacophony by listening to books on tape. But as time goes by, I've actually been paying more attention, and have discovered something very curious about the district's largest smooth jazz station. Namely, that they don't actually play any.
Now, I don't just mean they don't play any jazz that qualifies as smooth, or any smooth that qualifies as jazz. I mean, they don't seem to play much of anything that bears a passing resemblance to any kind of jazz, not even of the "smooth" variety.
Here's a sample playlist of tunes I've noticed in heaviest rotation on 105.9:
George Benson - "On Broadway"
Alicia Keys - "Fallin"
Hall & Oates - "Sara Smile"
Nora Jones - "Don't Know Why"
Average White Band - "Pick Up the Pieces"
Santana - "Black Magic Woman"
Outkast - "I Like the Way You Move"
Steely Dan - "Reeling in the Years"
Now, granted the AWB song is a horn-based instrumental, and George Benson has had his jazz moments (that ain't one of them,) and Santana was a great improvisational musician in his heyday, and Steely Dan had some stuff on Aja that could almost be called fusion, and even Nora Jones could, I guess, be labeled vaguely "jazzy," but....let's get real. This isn't a jazz playlist. This is a pop playlist. At best, it's a slightly R&B-oriented pop playlist, but a pop playlist nonetheless.
It's not in any way substantially different from what you could hear on any of a gajillion other adult contemporary stations with taglines like "soft rock," "the wave," "light FM," or "super oldies." Not that I lament the exclusion of Bobby McFerrin, Manhattan Transfer, Spyro Gyra or the immortal Ken Gorelick, but why bother to call the station "smooth jazz" when that's clearly not what's on offer?
The only answer that comes to mind immediately is that the programmers found a way to tap the larger-than-you-would-think demographic of poseurs who really want to be able to SAY they're the kind of folks who listen to jazz...without actually having to do it.
And that, my friends, is pure marketing genius.
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