At most of the jazz gigs I play, the audience is predominated by late-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white couples, the sort who golf clap after each solo, chortling “oh, I say, wasn’t that delightful!”

Every so often, I’m lucky enough to play a bebop gig up in the heart of Harlem, where I’m the token white kid in a band otherwise comprised of wizened black guys in their 70’s, guys who wear bowler hats and say “hep”, “cat” and “like, dig.” There, the audience is little old black couples, who shout “mm hm!! mm hm!!” or “yeah! come on!” while we’re playing.

Nowhere I play, however, do I see many young people. Sure, there are a handful of twenty and thirty year-olds at any gig, but they’re almost invariably musicians themselves. I’m not sure why my peers have never discovered jazz, though in part I suppose it’s the fault of jazz musicians ourselves, who somehow let music once synonymous with defiant, up-yours cool become instead synonymous with soothing elevator rides.

Still, I don’t think today’s musicians hold all the blame – even while the Brittney Spears of the world dominate popular radio, for example, people in their twenties and thirties continue to dig back into rock of the ’60’s and ’70’s. For some reason, however, almost none of them are digging into (or simply digging) that era’s jazz.

But, in many ways, jazz was far enough ahead of it’s time to have less in common with rock of the time, and more with today’s indie rock. Lo-fi? Miles Davis practically invented it. Ironic hipster cool? Check the unimpeachably wonderful names of Charles Mingus compositions, like “The Shoes Of The Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.” Or perhaps more in common with today’s hip hop – Herbie Hancock’s thirty year-old releases, which fathered both funk and fusion jazz, are some of the most used sources of samples, hooks and beats.

So perhaps there’s hope for jazz after all. Perhaps the fact that jazz now lives relegated to Starbucks sampler CDs and Sophomore year faux-sophisticated hook-up music playlists represents the darkest hour just before dawn. After all, at several points in jazz’s century-long history, the art has been prematurely autopsied, declared DOA just before some new innovators lifted it back up to new heights and new public recognition.

If any music is about comebacks, about the quintessentially American-ness of rising, Phoenix-like, from one’s own ashes, jazz is it. So I have hope. Or, at least, faith. Faith that, even without people looking for it, jazz good enough to revive the medium would find listeners. Find people who may not know exactly what they’re waiting for, but will know it when they hear. People who will, for the first time, understand Louis Armstrong’s timeless description of what makes jazz: “Brother, if you have to ask, then you’ll never know.”