That's not new news. However, pondering why 3/4 of the crowd built up during Kris Bowers's anemic set drifted off during Kenny Garrett's fine set, I've concluded that that AOCF crowd I was with preferred the muddle to "full" jazz (or had something else important to hear).
I experienced another aspect of crowd preference Saturday night. After a much too short Ben Williams set of "full" jazz that used funk rhythms (& did it much better than Kris Bowers), multi-string instrument player/singer Alan Hampton & singer Gretchen Parlato tried to shift gears into acoustic, non-songbook tunes. That was not what that audience wanted! More than half the audience bolted in stages between tunes, going off to whatever other music was available (pretty much of which lives in the jazz-soul-rock-hiphop borderlands).
What to make of this? Well, there was other more straight-ahead jazz on tap. I heard good things about the Al Strong & Eve Cornelius sets Friday night. I also heard from a local musician who listens primarily to my generation's jazz that, when he caught some of Robert Glasper that the latter "was fooling around" & that the Armory sound system was terrible. Lastly, I didn't catch Marc Cary's midnight set. So I need to hear/read more about all that jazz before drawing any conclusions.
I can say I'm already thinking about AOCF 2016 but need to be realistic about what the audience is for the jazz I want to hear...