Being a musician, I am, of course, biased but the good news is that I do believe jazz can be saved. The bad news is, I doubt that it will. The art of melodic improvisation flourished when it was part of the popular music of the '20's through the big band era. Kids who were buying records could relate to it physically through dancing. In order to awaken the public's atrophied ears to our beloved art form, that connection would have to be reestablished. A golden opportunity was missed during the GAP commercial inspired mini swing craze of the mid to late '90's. It got young people swing dancing. The craze ended because, not suprisingly, people became bored with the music even though the players wore funny hats and twirled their instruments and made every effort to be visually entertaining. Why?
Maybe we should be a little scientific about this. Not rocket science, mind you, because we are talking about entertainment here. Back in the '70's, when dance clubs still hired bands (before DJs took over completely) I had an epiphany of sorts while taking a guitar solo with my "funk" band. The dance floor was full but I realized that my solo could be good, bad, or mediocre and it really would not make much of a difference to the dancers. That was because they were dancing to the symmetrical back beats on 2 and 4 of the measure. As Dick Clark's studio audiences on American Band Stand repeatedly informed us - it is a good beat and it is easy to dance to (sic).
I once saw a film of the Benny Goodman band where the camera was looking down on a crowded dance floor from a balcony. As Goodman built his clarinet solo to a climax, you could see the dancers jumping higher into the air. They were driven by Gene Krupa's quarter notes on the bass drum and loud, propulsive, asymmetrical hits on the snare, but people were essentially dancing to the improvised melody. The drumming of Joe Jones with the Basie band is another example of asymmetrical back beats. Unfortunately, none of the swing acts that achieved notoriety during the '90's (Big, Bad Voodoo Daddy, Brian Setzer et al...) picked up on this. The shuffle got old real fast. Strong back beats propel the dancers but a steady 2 and 4 disengages them from the melody.
Forget jazz and history and zoot suits for a minute and break it down to the sonic essentials of what makes people dance and there may be a glimmer of hope for a fusion with melodic improvisation. Whether people are dancing to Rihanna or Basie, we know that they like it around 120 beats per minute. What they are dancing to is the quarter note pulse. You can easily take any contemporary dance track, strip away everything but the bass drum, and superimpose Satin Doll. The only difference is that the rhythm of the modern (unimprovised) melodic content is usually defined with straight eighths and sixteenth notes instead of swing eighths.
At this point, you may ask - "who cares?" Well, we do, obviously and the marketing and promotional geniuses have not been able to prevent America's only original art form from going down the tubes. Could it be that the music itself needs to be dealt with? It didn't mean a thing without that swing because that was the feeling that connected the dancer and the melodic improvisor. New music can be created with that feeling that connects with today's dancers but it won't swing for long unless the crutch of the symmetrical back beat is avoided.

i'll check this out, and here's another recent one: "Can jazz be saved?" http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB10001424...

also, as i'm sure you remember, there was a day when pitchfork reviewed jazz. happy apple's early records got major props, and i remember some miles davis reissue 10.0s that really made me go seek them out.

Whether or not Pitchfork is even relevant anymore is debate for an entirely different post, but yes, they did indeed review jazz records early on. In fact, the review of Matthew Shipp Duo's DNA singlehandedly altered the way I think about jazz to this day (well, technically the review led me to buy the album, which was a turning point for me personally).

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7119-dna/

But I digress from the Pitchfork thing. The real issue here is whether or not jazz as a whole can survive without embracing digital promotion. Distribution will still be through a variety of channels (CD, vinyl, digital) but the rapid adoption of online promotion can really help jazz to turn itself around. It isn't so much that jazz isn't relevant - it is - but whether jazz can have a place of prominence again within the larger music community.