Flashback 2004/Jazz: The year saw some great concerts, but audiences seem to be slipping. Perhaps that's merely the fate of all music, writes Ray Comiskey.

The great American alto saxophonist Phil Woods recently described teaching jazz as being "like fattening frogs for snakes". His beef was the music business, not music educators, he told the US music magazine Down Beat. "The music is the easy part," he said. "It's all that other stuff. To play with young energy is simple, but to sustain a career in music takes a lot of dedication. You may major in Coltrane, but you gotta play Britney Spears on tour for a living."

So what else is new? Well, the Celtic Tiger Mk II may be on the prowl, but the word on the street is that many of the live-music business's more interesting branches are struggling to hold on to their audiences. Even some high-profile pop events have seen promoters' expectations scaled back. And, although neither this year's Guinness Jazz Festival, in Cork, nor Bray Jazz Festival saw any decline in numbers, jazz has had its share of what seems to be an across-the-board phenomenon.

A leading jazz figure here agrees that this industry-wide phenomenon is, in the demographers' jargon, probably multifactorial. You can fill in the blanks yourself: traffic, high prices (true of some branches of music but not true of almost all jazz), iPods and Internet downloading, too many alternatives chasing the entertainment dollar, demands of work, family, whatever. But he posits an intriguing speculation: that, as a society, we are losing our curiosity, that people want reassurance, not revolution, comfort, not challenge.

Again, what else is new? Jazz is the opposite of aural wallpaper, whether confronting the status quo and re-examining or even revisiting its own tradition.

When, in a notably exciting start to the year, the Improvised Music Company brought in three cutting-edge contemporary New York jazz groups, led by the saxophonists Chris Speed and Dave Binney and the pianist David Berkman, to Dublin the music was hardly sing-along stuff. Audiences, particularly for the first two, were disappointing.

But that's arguably the fate of all on the avant-garde or thereabouts. What about more accessible jazz? If it's just a tad unusual, same thing; when Dublin Jazz Society brought in the outstanding veteran British pianist, composer, orchestrator and educator Michael Garrick only a handful attended his high-quality concert at the Bank of Ireland. Yet all this happened against a backdrop of unprecedented playing activity and renewal on the local jazz scene. Go figure.

This year reconfirmed that we have an emerged or just emerging generation of jazz musicians on a scale not seen before. Justin Carroll's Organics may have been around for seven years, but they're still young musicians. This was their year as the first jazz group to win Music Network's Young Musicwide award; a début CD is planned. Carroll's brother, Roy, has been pursuing a mix of jazz and electronica for some time with his Trouble Penetrator group, which launched its own début CD this month. Dylan Rynhart has come up with something unique with his Fuzzy Logic band, and there's also the boundary-pushing Kai Sextet, to pick just a few examples.

Newpark Music Centre, in south Co Dublin, which has much to do - though not all - with this phenomenon, saw auditions for its full-time jazz courses grow to be the biggest ever. Notwithstanding Phil Woods's snakes and frogs analogy, the courses are filled to capacity.

Where all this will lead inevitably comes back to what will become of the players when they graduate. The scale of a small society like ours doesn't allow much space for an audience and the infrastructure to go with it to develop - unless, of course, you're lucky enough to have a Government Minister in the constituency where you have your rowing club. Or something.

One response has been evident in Dublin and elsewhere. In the capital people such as Kenneth Killeen and the saxophonist Sean Mac Erlaine have been organising regular gigs for a variety of bands and musicians, building on the work of the Improvised Music Company. The same is being done by the bassists Damian Evans, in Galway, and Jaimie Carswell, in Sligo. It's welcome and needs to be encouraged, but it's hardly a panacea for what seems to be a tricky time for much of live music. For society and music there's no quick fix for this. Tedious and unoriginal though it may be to say it, it goes back to the place of music in our education system. It shouldn't all be left to the Newparks and established music-education institutions in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, for example, to bear the burden. Exposure's the thing; it's no coincidence that families in which the parents are involved in music tend to produce children who are like-minded.

Which, in a way, brings us back to jazz, because this year the Improvised Music Company brought back its Openjazz Day, free for all the family, to Temple Bar. It wasn't quite as child-friendly as it might have been, but it's a step in the right direction, as its day-long activities highlight the fact that most live jazz takes place at hours and venues unsuitable for children and young students.

And that, again, brings us back to Woods. If, he said, he were teaching at university, he would put the music students on a bus, paint the windows black, give them ugly uniforms and 400 sheets of music out of order, then drive them round the campus in circles for 30 hours. Next he'd stop, put them up on a dark stage with no sound system or sound man, call a number for them to play and let them scramble to find the music. After that he'd tell them to pack it all away and get back on the blacked-out bus for another 30-hour drive.

He would repeat the dose for several days, then ask: "Now, who wants to make this their life?" Because, he says, this is what the music business is. Yet, despite his not totally over-the-top analogy, the fact remains that jazz retains the power to attract practitioners and supporters no matter what difficulties or State indifference they encounter or how meagre the financial rewards. That's a truism amply illustrated, yet again, in 2004.

But have we really lost our curiosity? Have the consumers really become more passive? Or were they always like that? Or are they just more choosy? Whatever the answer, the poser seems to be shared by any art form that asks the audience not to switch to automatic pilot; look at the national theatre's disastrous experience in its centenary year. But it's not a problem shared by Britney Spears or anyone similarly favoured with a brief moment of fame.

Take five . . .

. . . memorable concerts

1 Tomasz Stanko A privilege to hear the great Polish trumpeter and his marvellous quartet at Bray Jazz Festival.

2 South Facing Ronan Guilfoyle's specially commissioned work was premièred at Guinness Jazz Festival by a stellar international group from Europe and America; unfortunately, Lyric, which has recorded so many good things, didn't get this one.

3 Dave Binney The altoist, with a quartet whose superb rhythm section - Jacob Sacks (piano), Thomas Morgan (bass) and Dan Weiss (drums) - looked barely old enough to vote, showed just how all-embracing and adventurous jazz is at its boundary-stretching best.

4 Marc Copland His solo concert at Bank of Ireland revealed a poet of the piano.

5 Brad Mehldau Another solo pianist; got a deserved standing ovation at the National Concert Hall.