At the risk of drifting off-topic, although I believe this guy deserves all the crap we can dish out, some posts were making me think about what people see and hear on TV and that the general population not only has no idea what jazz is, they don't even know what decent singing is. As I drift through the channels on my TV, I hear portions of those various reality TV singing shows, like American Idol and The Voice. Last night something came on while I was at my computer and I didn't get up to change it, it just kept playing. I hated it. On all these shows, the singing is usually gawdawful. Yet the judges, or whatever they are, will always say something positive and will couch their negatives in a lot of softening language. The audiences applaud wildly, for what is obvious to anyone with an ear, "singers" who can't really sing. It's not just that they're off pitch, it's that they're not even close, their singing technique is totally lacking, and they're painful and annoying to listen to. Yet they're singing on a national television program. So the casual viewer accepts that this is what good singing is.
And then there are all the "professional" and other singers who sing the national anthem at sports events. If they're really good, they just sing it straight (it's hard enough as it is). But the really awful ones feel a need to do their own "interpretation" and end up badly butchering the song. It makes me want to shoot them. Yet the consequence is, especially when the singer is some sort of "star" or recording artist, that the vast majority of the audience thinks this is good singing when it's clearly not.
So the same thing has happened with all music, not just jazz. People don't have any way to judge musical quality or musicianship because what they are presented as good music and talent in the mass media is actually bad music and poor musical ability. I don't know that anything can be done about it. It's just the across-the-board lowering of standards that happens with mass media appealing to the lowest common denominator. The only bright spot in this depressing state of affairs is that when a true talent comes along, it usually stands out because it's so obviously several levels above the crap that everybody is consuming. I'm not as impressed by Adele as most other people apparently are -- I think her songs are all the same -- but she clearly has a good voice, she writes songs that appeal to people, and she sings them with emotional expressivity. Result: unlike the liar Ski Johnson, she really is #1 on the charts and took home a truckload of Grammies. Talent will out. Meanwhile, a lot of dreck will pass as decent music. But it won't survive in the long run. I guess it will always be so.
/rant off