Why do jazz musicians rarely release music videos?

Jazz heads look at it as a fluid, more organic kind of music, in general. When you talk to serious jazz players, they talk about it the way some writers do in fiction about magic and forces of nature.

There's even a movie, "Soul" that gives a great example of the way the jazz players I've known think and talk about the music.

And that's the key. Jazz is about the music, the performance, not the players (though there's fandoms). And you can't capture that, then plaster visuals over it. Most jazz fans I've known wouldn't watch videos, per se. They might play a video, so that they could hear it, but if it isn't essentially a recording of an actual performance, they wouldn't give two shits about what they see. Hell, they might not give any shits at all.

There's exceptions, of course. And there's branches of jazz that are more visual friendly. There's some jazz that's meant for dancing, as an example. You could likely do videos of that and the fans would enjoy it.

But there's also the fact that videos that aren't just one camera recording someone playing are expensive to make. Jazz isn't as popular as it once was, which means that you aren't going to get much return on that investment. You're better off just recording a performance and leaving it at that, if you want a visual of your music.

And, as someone that isn't into jazz, I also don't think there's any point to videos for jazz. Go look at some Kenny G videos. That's about as mainstream as jazz has been in a long time, and his videos really only worked a little in getting him fans. It gave him a tiny bit of crossover, but he was also a pretty guy marketing himself as much as his music.

Jazz is often improvisational, so it’s hard to plan and produce a music video around that. Plus, the genre of music itself doesn’t really lend itself to the sort of exciting visual experience accompaniment that other music genres do.

Lastly, music videos are often used as promotion to push massive sales of streams/downloads/whatever. Jazz albums don’t really generate enough revenue to justify the cost of expensive music videos, and the audience isn’t really interested in them.

By music videos, do you mean live videos of them playing a show? Or like a contrived music video that's edited like a short film?

I can’t find any for classical either. Or choral. Damn few bluegrass music videos. I’m a huge Ravi Shankar fan too and you know what? Dude ain’t got a one. The list goes on once you think about it.

Because music videos are from rather later in the age of television and they are popular with mass appeal music from a decade or so after the golden age of TV onward, especially musical styles that feature a “front” man or woman whose job it is to be the face of the group and deliver their vocals. They were especially popularized by MTV and VH-1 in the 1980s and those networks carried the mass commercial appeal genres of the day: which didn’t include jazz.

It’s just a particular genre of expression that is actually fairly local in time and not some essential feature one can expect from all music.

If you're like the smooth jazz station that used to be around here, then you might count shit like The Dave Matthews Band as jazz (for some reason), and they have music videos.

You've gotten a lot of good responses here, so I thought I'd just drop an example of a jazz music video. https://youtu.be/swcSU71gixw

Watch videos of the live streams from Smalls in New York https://www.smallslive.com/