Jazz in America: Who's Listening?  Jazz in America: Who's
Listening?  by Scott K. DeVeaux copyright © 1999 Scott K.
DeVeaux  As a historian, my usual beat has been jazz's
(relatively) distant past. I spend much of my research time
worrying about what musicians did half a century ago. And yet
recently I found myself engrossed in a project that brought me
right up to date, right up against issues that concern jazz
players in the 1990s.  In 1992, the National Endowment for the
Humanities conducted a broad-based Survey of Public
Participation in the Arts (or SPPA). This was the third such
survey, the first having taken place a decade earlier in 1982.
With the help of the Census Bureau, over 12,000 adult Americans
were contacted and asked a series of detailed questions about
their involvement with the arts. (Ironically, the SPPA was added
on to the National Crime Survey, so that people were first asked
how many times they'd been mugged, and then how many times
they'd gone to the opera.) Jazz was one of seven "benc