Some of the world’s most famous musicians recently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annual International Jazz Day. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying voice across cultures.
世界上一些最著名的音乐家最近聚集在巴黎和新奥尔良，庆祝首个一年一度的国际爵士乐日。联合国教科文组织最近将4月30日定为国际爵士乐日，用以提高人们对爵士乐及其重要性、作为跨文化统一声音的潜力的认识。
Despite the celebrations, though, in the U.S. the jazz audience continues to shrink and grow older, and the music has failed to connect with younger generations.
尽管有庆祝活动，但在美国，爵士乐观众持续减少，年龄越来越大，爵士乐未能吸引到年轻一代。
It’s Jason Moran’s job to help change that. As the Kennedy Center’s artistic adviser for jazz, Moran hopes to widen the audience for jazz, make the music more accessible, and preserve its history and culture.
杰森·莫兰的工作就是帮助改变这种状况。作为肯尼迪中心的爵士乐艺术顾问，莫兰希望扩大爵士乐的受众范围，更容易接触爵士乐，并保留其历史和文化。
“Jazz seems like it’s not really a part of the American appetite,” Moran tells National Public Radio’s reporter Neal Conan. “What I’m hoping to accomplish is that my generation and younger start to reconsider and understand that jazz is not black and write anymore. It’s actually color, and it’s actually digital.”
“爵士乐似乎并不被美国人所欣赏”，莫兰告诉国家公共广播电台记者尼尔·柯南，“我希望能做到的是，我这一代人和年轻人开始重新思考和理解爵士乐不再是黑色和文字。它实际上是彩色的，是数字的”。
Moran says one of the problems with jazz today is that the entertainment aspect of the music has been lost. “The music can’t be presented today the way it was in 1908 or 1958. It has to continue to move, because the way the world works is not the same,” says Moran.
莫兰说，当今爵士乐的一个问题是，爵士乐的娱乐性已经丧失。莫兰说：“今天的爵士乐不能像1908年或1958年那样呈现。它必须继续前进，因为世界的运行方式变了”。
Last year, Moran worked on a project that arranged Fats Waller’s music for a dance party, “Just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music,” says Moran. “For me, it’s the recontextualization. In music, where does the emotion lie? Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context,” says Moran, “so I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.”
去年，莫兰参与了一个项目，为一个舞蹈派对安排了法茨·沃勒的音乐，“只是想让人们记住沃勒的音乐既是舞曲也是音乐会音乐”，莫兰说，“对我来说，这是二次语境化。在音乐中，情感在哪里？我们作为人类是否在如何谈论我们自己，以及像查理·帕克唱片这样抽象的东西如何让我们进入关于我们的情感和思想的对话方面有所感悟？有时候我们看不到音乐有更广阔的背景”，莫兰说，“所以我想继续这些对话，这些是我想培养的东西。”