''My Way'' is the requiem for our 1998 jazz retrospective, and Frank Sinatra's death is the least of it. Sinatra at least completed the natural span of his performing life, and he possessed the superstar clout that enabled him, with relatively little risk, to adopt Paul Anka's maudlin anthem of self-promotion as a personal creed. More courageous in their insistence on self-determination, and nowhere near the point of creative exhaustion or well-cosseted retirement, were Thomas Chapin and Betty Carter, whose losses hang over the past year like a shroud.
Chapin and Carter were among the last of the jazz independents. They created on their own terms, and their uncompromised performances provided assurances that marketing directors and other high-concept jazz strategists had not attained absolute power. Chapin, who cast his artistic fate with the alternative subculture, was steadily building an audience with his alto sax and flute and his powerful trio. Carter, an original jazz-biz guerrilla with her Bet Car label, and a tireless supporter of young musicians, lived long enough to win a Grammy and see her JazzAhead program brought to Washington's Kennedy Center, but too long to avoid the indignity of being dropped early in '98 by the Verve label she played such a central role in reestablishing a decade ago.
Not that those at Verve's who cut Carter loose are resting easy about their own prospects. Despite being the lone successful major label last year, and once again playing the new-product game more successfully than most with the John Scofield/Medeski, Martin & Wood ''A Go Go'' and Herbie Hancock's ''Gershwin's World,'' the acquisition of Verve parent PolyGram by Seagrams (which also owns GRP/Impulse!) presents Verve executives with the same merge-and-downsize fears that their less commercially potent competitors have learned to live with.
Artist rosters were trimmed everywhere, as top management at all the major labels noted that jazz's share of total industry sales has dropped from nearly 5 to less than 3 percent in a decade. (That translates into 20 million units, including both ''contemporary'' and ''traditional'' titles, of an industrywide 670 million sold last year, according to Howard Mandel's enlightening survey of jazz economics in the September issue of Jazziz). The CD boom that helped fuel new interest in jazz has clearly peaked, at least temporarily, which only leaves the large pool of the unsigned and the growing ranks of the formerly signed more frustrated than ever with the mania for tribute albums, and the need to compete with yet-again-recycled works by departed legends.
Not that all trends promise to be dead ends. The ''swing'' craze may be much ado about a misnamed, antiseptic R&B revival; and in that sense, what now passes for swing represents a more egregious bit of labeling than ''smooth jazz.'' The embrace of Cuban music, which should only accelerate as a growing number of American musicians flock to the island's annual December music festival, is likely to bear more substantial creative fruits. Yet it is the need to embrace some hot style, any hot style, dictated by someone other than the deal- desperate musician that is the problem.
Recording was not the only endangered road to independence in 1998. Jazz radio more frequently found itself subjected to the dictates of programmers, and even public stations in some markets have taken to editing tracks to remove solos that some might consider too challenging. (In this regard Boston, with its several college stations and the continuing commitment of more powerful FM signals, is far ahead of the norm.) The loss of NEA support has the same dire consequences for jazz as for the rest of the arts; and the winding down of the National Jazz Network, which the Lila Wallace Foundation launched around the time Lincoln Center created its jazz program (though it lacked the latter's institutional clout and a spokesman like Wynton Marsalis), has put the country's most promising touring consortium at risk. The announced sale of George Wein's Festival Productions (to BET) raises questions about the short- and long-term effects on many showcase jazz events, while the fallout from financial questions surrounding June's Texaco Jazz Festival (a.k.a. Knitting Factory impresario Michael Dorf's assault on Wein's New York beachhead) has made the counter-corporate pose of Manhattan's downtown jazz mogul appear as suspect as the fans-first claims of Dan Duquette.
So 1998 has in many ways been a dire jazz year, though not a totally hopeless one. Many musicians, including some of the most creative, have found that a willingness to take to the road and book their own grass-roots tours is the best way to create and nurture a new audience. Marketing through the Internet raises hopes that artist-owned labels can circumvent distribution woes that make it a challenge to find even widely heralded jazz discs in chain stores. Labels like Black Saint/Soul Note, ECM, hatOLOGY, Screwgun, and Winter & Winter demonstrated that both a vision and a substantial body of music can be created outside the multinational corporate umbrella, and Blue Note, Impulse!, Warner Brothers, and others brought enough worthy product into the marketplace to stave off total despair.
And how can you hate a year that contained one of Sonny Rollins's greatest live performances, or two exceptional pre-centennial presentations of Duke Ellington's music by area artists, or the reassuring eloquence of many veterans and the audacious inventions of several less established voices? The local performances by those in the accompanying list - and by others who did not make the cut, like Abbey Lincoln, Hamiet Bluiett, Don Byron, Brad Mehldau, Chucho Valdes, Jackie McLean, Mose Allison, Kenny Garrett, Jim Hall, Ned Rothenberg, and Larry Carlton - assure that the spirits of Tom Chapin and Betty Carter live. At least until the next crisis.
