Summary: In the late 1980's and early '90s, it was hard to escape the sound of smooth jazz emanating from the radio. With artists like George Benson, Dave Koz, and of course, saxophonist Kenny G releasing one hit song after another, it felt like the genre would never go away. Then in 2010, the death of smooth jazz seemed impending as the radio stations it was created for began disappearing from the airwaves. But as The New York Times pop and jazz critic Nate Chinen explains, smooth jazz hasn't completely gone away, just set sail. Interview Highlights Nate Chinen, on how smooth jazz has maintained its audience after it's disappearance from radio: There is still a very vibrant, in fact, audience for smooth jazz. It's just that they're finding their fix in a different way that they used to. One of the former executives at [New York smooth jazz radio station] CD 101.9 is now involved in this company that produces the Smooth Cruise, which I took a couple of weeks ago. It's affiliated with Spirit Cruises and it goes down the Hudson and up the East River. The Smooth Cruise is a kind of miniature version of these big luxury cruises that take off. The idea is the same. It's that: "We're gonna put on your favorite artists and we're going to make it a fun experience, and we'll go out to sea and have a good time." That is where the sort of center of the action is now if you are a smooth jazz fan. On the creation of smooth jazz: The phrase itself is such marketing catnip. Basically, it came out of a focus group. I believe it was in Chicago, they were testing out radio formats and they had a focus group together and were playing some of this stuff. A woman in the focus group said, "You know it's like jazz but you know, not -- I guess it's kind of like smooth jazz." And you know the bells went off in the control room behind the two-way mirror. That phrase, I think, was meant to differentiate it from what we knew as jazz. On the possibility of smooth jazz influencing current records, such as Daft Punk's Random Access Memories: It's an interesting thought because we all sort of assume that smooth jazz is this sort of fake or debased or kind of light offering. That it doesn't have anything to do with real music. But if you are a fan of smooth jazz or one of it's practitioners, you look at pop music today and you see a bunch of stuff that was produced in a room with synthesizers or on a computer. There's no real musicianship involved and everyone's auto-tuned. So, to their credit these are real musicians. Most of these artists have real drummers, real rhythm sections, they're playing music. You look at the Daft Punk record, it's the same ethos. It's this idea of "Let's get some real great studio musicians!"
