Time Out music critic, John Gill is distinctly miffed by random rumours of a jazz revival.

There has been a great deal of talk about a 'jazz revival' this year. Oddly, although this is sometimes the way these things happen, the people who have seen the least evidence of such a thing are Britain's very own jazz musicians. Off the top of my head, among the leading jazz musicians I know, one has been subsisting on a mix of the dole and charity housing for more years than he cares to remember. Another has been on the dole for most of this year, and still one more has had only two paid gigs this year. Another observed sourly, but correctly, that 'you can't get a gig unless you're a fucking teenager.'

These are not the sour grapes of obscure experimentalists, or second-rate performers. They are the cream of their generation, hailed by the media and feted everywhere else but at home. Age and fashion are conspiring to prematurely commit them to the old people's home, and all the media babble about a 'jazz revival' is just one more unnecessary slap in the face.

The jazz revival is a whim indulged by bored Face journalists, abetted by a few half-competent A&R people and given credence by people who really should know better. True, there is a new generation of young jazz talent, although it is doubtful whether it contains the creative ability of the last wave of young British jazz talent, the ones I mentioned above, who probably had the parents of this current wave in their audiences. And while a lazy media may be passing the time lauding Courtney Pine or Loose Tubes, this new generation are already finding out that the reality of jazz is, more or less as ever, plugging away at your own music to general disinterest, or submitting to the crushing round of anonymous sessions, rock album and tour backline work, or the deeply humbling experience of playing for the numerous trad and mainstream bands who dominate the beer and beards pub circuit. This isn't a revival so much as early fossilization.

The 'jazz revival' is in fact taking place in South Molton Street and Covent Garden. It is quite probably being masterminded from the stock room of Paul Smith in Floral Street. It is about baggy suits, shopping and namedropping. At its most visible, it is about Robert Elms listing Parker, Coltrane or Jobim in his playlist for a month, then dropping them when the new Style Council album comes out. Luckily, most of them are dead and thus spared this wretched glory.

I first spotted the 'jazz revival' about five years ago, when a long-dead two-bit suburban white funk band asked a Venue audience if they wanted some more 'Jaaaaazz!!!' They did, so off the band sailed into some more sub-Crusaders jazz-funk. August Darnell also has a lot to answer for, having plagiarised Cab Calloway (the cameo in 'Stormy Weather', to be precise) for his stage persona of Kid Creole. At least August did it with style and swing, but woodwork squeaked and out came Blue Rondo, Funkapolitan, ABC, you name it. The Pop Group and its various spin-offs — Max Joy, Rip Rig, Pigbag — at least tried to locate the steamy heart, but by the time the 'jazz revival' hit the shops it meant little more than a baggy suit, a well-held cocktail and a list of nightclubs. And all the young bucks had to do was was steal this potent if hollow symbol from right under the oldsters' noses while they dozed on the verandah! Entirely fooled by the hype, public and industry actually applauded this lucrative larceny, and if the oldsters tried to report the felony they were laughed out of the police station.

There will probably never be a real jazz revival. Jazz, a music of countless dialects spanning over seven decades, doesn't fit. It doesn't fit singles formats, radio programming, marketing campaigns, the way we merchandise, publicise and personalise music. Ultimately, because of these factors, it doesn't fit the way we have been conditioned to consume music. Even though these rules are imposed from the outside, jazz — in all its forms, from dixie through bop, cool, free to funk — is a free, if underfed, spirit, and requires a bit of give and take. Business can't cope with that. The product has to be defined, packaged, labelled, targetted, rendered harmless. It needs a (pleasing) profile on the shelf, and it needs a face to be sold and adored.

Enter Courtney Pine, stage left and already out of his depth. If he isn't already, Courtney will probably rue his success. He himself is blameless — he can hardly tell hacks and punters to sod off — but Courtney is the jazz revival. There is a growing, if unspoken, resentment against him in the jazz scene, and it is not helped when the media use some patronising little photocaption about the young working class black kid made good as proof that they are covering jazz adequately. Tell that to the people at Ronnies, 100 Club, Seven Dials, LMC, Bull's Head.

Courtney may turn out to be as much a victim as those other jazz musicians, although uniquely his position as such is at least paid. A genial mixture of modesty and ambition, he's not the most likely figurehead for this fiction so much as the nearest to hand. A gifted technician, either with his own, rather recherche Quartet, or with the powerful and modern Jazz Warriors, he simply wandered onto the set of this satire, and at entirely the wrong time.

The jazz revival is a symptom of the increasing desperation of the music industry and its auxiliaries. It's as much about clothes, cliche and Capital Radio as Sigue Sigue Sputnik. (Even Working Week, most laudable of the bunch, admit they're synthesising various styles into a pop, maybe even Top of the Pops, format.) In the post-modern age, when anythings goes with anything, aspects will trickle down, and the situation may ease. But while those stars of British jazz are still on the dole, every time I hear the term 'jazz revival' I reach for my revolver.