In the jazz community Marsalis' opinions are generally regarded as elitist and regressive and often times he will go on TV, radio etc trying to speak as the voice of a tradition that heavily disagrees with him.
Many of his peers and people who have played in his bands have been active participants in the hip hop community for decades.
If you look at what jazz as a method of social activism and a way to speak about the state of life in black america in the past century, thats really what hip hop is doing now.
Hip hop talks about drug use/violence etc because its whats happening in the communities that the music comes out of.
Jazz at its most important points in history was often fraught with musicians who were heavily addicted to drugs, abused woman, caught up in violence etc (just look up the issues some of the greats dealt with like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, etc)
Hip hop and jazz are fundamentally two extremely similar traditions of music born out of the same realities of the black american experience and for Wynton to being making comments like this is extremely disappointing
If I read things right, the pictures were being used were actually from MLS sites, and Zillow was using them on their site.
A large goal of the site is to take the different closed off MLS listings and aggregate them on one site for people to find.
But, working with the MLS sites is extremely hard to do and they require sometimes large fees and have very strict/weird requirements to use the data.
The big thing with Zillow, is that a problem for them is having access to as many MLS listings as possible, since most of the realtors use the MLS to post homes. Without these, its basically just a price estimator and search engine for homes.
Zillow already has a tenuous relationship with the MLS sites and most likely pursued the lawsuit to prove to the MLS sites they are serious about the use of their images, and likely were worried about this affecting their relationship with some of those listing agencies.
Although only speculation, I see this as more likely than the lawyers just going after this to be a bully (but they still probably did the wrong thing either way).
Many of his peers and people who have played in his bands have been active participants in the hip hop community for decades.
If you look at what jazz as a method of social activism and a way to speak about the state of life in black america in the past century, thats really what hip hop is doing now.
Hip hop talks about drug use/violence etc because its whats happening in the communities that the music comes out of.
Jazz at its most important points in history was often fraught with musicians who were heavily addicted to drugs, abused woman, caught up in violence etc (just look up the issues some of the greats dealt with like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, etc)
Hip hop and jazz are fundamentally two extremely similar traditions of music born out of the same realities of the black american experience and for Wynton to being making comments like this is extremely disappointing