It's not dead, but (please correct me as I'm not a student of the genre), the 'free jazz', directionless noodling that for many is unpleasant to the ears, did the same for jazz as Stravinsky and company did for orchestral music.

Sure, it 'advanced' the genre, but it lost it's popularity with the general public.

For the record, my 7th grader's .mp3 player is about half full of Coltrane, Getz, Parker, Gordon etc. (can you tell he's a sax nut?)

No, he didn't get this stuff from the radio, nor from iTunes, but from dear old dad's CD collection (which I have purposely seeded with jazz greats amongst bluegrass, classical, rock, country and gospel greats as well. The big network of Goodwill stores in our town gives me access to cheap used CDs (usually $1.99) and the CD collection has at least doubled in the past 4 years with my addiction of finding great music on the cheap.)

I like Miles Davis' "Birth of the Cool" (I have the version with the studio cuts and live cuts,) but man - his later avant garde stuff just grates on me.

Coltrane: Give me the smooth melody of Naima over the rambling (though I'm sure some understand it) noodling of Blue Train.

Just for one example of where jazz likely loses this listener - though this was a very popular Coltrane tune from my understanding.

In my opinion, which I think mirror's bobcflatpicker's comments, is there is a point with any type of music where the cleverness of the music outruns the general public's ability to enjoy it and follow it.

Whatever happened to progressive rock, where the great prog rock groups enjoyed massive popularity (Yes for example)?

Dream Theater is one band that is known (probably the most accessible and popular active prog rock band in existence today), but you won't hear a Dream Theater song on the radio unless it's some special show on a late night at a college radio station. As for chops, Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater can likely play/sight read/improvise the socks off of most classical pianists, jazz pianists, rock keyboardists, and so forth. But the music is almost too technically complex. He's selling apps for iOS devices.

What happened to choral music? My sister has a gig in Indianapolis as a first call soprano for a couple of college choir publishing companies - for their demo CDs. Most of the stuff is so technically 'out there' it's just noise. Rarely is it anthemic, epic, pastoral, etc. Simply just syllabic noise.

So, I guess to close up this bit of a ramble - I think what has happened to jazz is true for nearly every 'respected' genre of music. It's not gone for good, but there probably is a bit of reaction to the too technically clever flavors of it.

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