Cramming for your impending midterm at Price Center, an hour to spare before certain despair, you hear a familiar tune. Your most recent doomscroll session of Ryan Gosling edits comes to life at the hands of a fellow student playing the opening notes to “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” on the piano.
Since its release 10 years ago, director Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” has taken on new life through Generation Z’s fixation on it. As many young people’s primary foray into jazz, the film carries with it cultural authority.
Jazz, since its inception, has been rooted in club and parade culture, facing repression long before it hit the mainstream. However, once academics and record labels found ways to institutionalize the genre in the ‘50s, sanitizing it for a white market, it became a commercial superpower. In this era, white musicians like Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck dominated the charts. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire musicals, which “La La Land” borrows from stylistically, utilized classical European aesthetics in jazz to sell the idea of whiteness at mass.
By portraying the genre through the nostalgic lens of old Hollywood, Chazelle’s film neglects the contemporary innovation of Black artists and reproduces the institutionalization of the ‘50s. For a new generation with no firsthand memory of the connection between jazz and dance culture, “La La Land” replaces the genre entirely rather than building upon it, encouraging viewers to pursue an unhealthy and self-centered engagement with the music. This is one example of many where exhaustive narratives of isolated musicians take precedence over the vibrant communal traditions that define jazz and place the genre on a trajectory of mediocrity and irrelevance.
In “La La Land,” Sebastian Wilder, a white pianist, is positioned as the savior of traditional jazz. He laments the bygone days of sweaty virtuosos within the cool jazz style, packing nightclubs with their dense and complex improvised solos, and tells Mia Dolan that the future of jazz is “dying on the vine. And the world says, ‘Let it die. It had its time.’”
While the film critiques Sebastian’s rigidity and selfishness, it does so in a way that paints him as a jazz savant. Sebastian’s journey as a musician does not require personal growth or the development of his style. His dream of opening a jazz club is realized at the end of the film, in which he is the central focus, with supporting Black musicians portrayed as less equal contributors and more akin to musical machines.
The film frames the only leading Black musician in the film, Keith — played by 12-time Grammy Award-winner John Legend — as producing soulless, commercialized jazz. Keith is positioned as a foil to Sebastian, representing the contemporary blending of the genre with EDM and pop, while Sebastian calls for a return to ‘50s traditions. Through positioning Sebastian’s views as ideal, the film reinforces limitations that have plagued jazz since its mainstream inception in the 1960s. Rather than being an authentic representation of the jazz renaissance of the mid-2010s, Keith’s music is dismissed as pop slop and not real jazz because it doesn’t fit with Chazelle’s views.
In an interview with The UCSD Guardian, Anthony Davis, a distinguished professor in the UCSD music department, described Chazelle’s attitude toward music and its pedagogy as “very stale.” In both “La La Land” and “Whiplash,” Chazelle represents jazz through white musicians “on the fringe” undergoing a “shallow enrichment” in their relationships with the music. Chazelle isn’t the first person to write stories using the insular tortured artist trope, but his work has romanticized this specific style of engagement with jazz for a new generation that didn’t grow up with figures like Miles Davis occupying the mainstream.
Despite Chazelle’s messaging, jazz doesn’t thrive by reproducing what came before but by continual growth and innovation. No one demonstrates this better than Future is Color, a San Diego-based organization dedicated to advancing the collective liberation of communities through music. One key group involved with FIC is RIVA, a jazz and EDM project led by a saxophonist of the same name. In an interview with The Guardian, Riva quoted saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, saying, “‘Jazz is not supposed to be something that’s required to sound like jazz. … The word jazz means I dare you. It’s to be bold to open yourself to multiple, you know, interpretations.’”
FIC’s studio sessions take this messaging to heart, blending jazz funk fusion with four on the floor house hits and many more interpretations of jazz. RIVA’s goal is to connect with every type of listener, mirroring this cross-genre diversity. As opposed to a tight-knit circle of jazz snobs, pianist, vibraphonist, and RIVA member Tamir Persekian explained their dedication to “catering to the new, introducing them to jazz in a way where they won’t get scared of it, but also catering to the jazz critics who are like … is this really jazz?”
FIC’s ability to provide free concerts to the San Diego community is currently under attack as the City Council is dramatically cutting public funding for the arts. “There’s not a single person saying, ‘Yeah, let’s give more money to the cops,’” Riva said. “There’s not a single person speaking on the microphone for the city’s decision. They are acting within their own circle.”
Despite Sebastian’s assertion in “La La Land” that “jazz is dying,” jazz will continue to grow and thrive as long as groups like RIVA and their audiences engage with the genre by coming together to dance and support those around them. By isolating ourselves in our pursuit of jazz, studying progressions alone in our dorms, we lose sight of the vibrancy in its traditions that gave the genre the staying power it had in the first place and set ourselves up to lose it altogether.
Research and interview assistance for this article was provided by Amanda Webber.
