Critiquing the Critics

Jazz bloggers like two things: navel gazing and "what does it all mean?" questions. When the two can be combined, hoo boy does the blogosphere erupt in hand-wringing soliloquies (I'm only being slightly facetious here).

Peter Hum:

There needs to be some critical distance when it comes to jazz writing. It's not quite like holding politicians to account, but even if a jazz writer is an unabashed advocate for the music, I think there has to be some sense that the critic likes some discs or musicians more than others and is more than an uncritical booster. Reader will have a better sense of how their tastes line up with a reviewer. And the absolutely gushing reviews have more meaning if there are lukewarm and even negative reviews to offset them. For comparison's sake: what would you think of a film reviewer who only gave out four-star reviews? And yet, you can easily find the equivalent in the jazz Interweb.

Jon Wertheim:

There are so many jazz blogs out there, and too many of them are wary of making any definite pronouncements. In doing so, they cheat us of their true potential. 

Anthony Dean-Harris:

Should we hold back negative criticism because our scene is so small and squabbling would be detrimental to our overall proliferation? This seems to have been the thinking for some time now in a era of logorrheic praise that borders on the fellacious. Yet while the this positivity may have turned jazz press into the Lollipop Guild (yours truly included), it may be time for us to move on to true criticism. Just as we have in the last few years moved from a genre with a very limited internet presence to that of one in which a jazz blog of noodling pontification is a stone’s throw away, maybe we can start making the Wertheim-noted value judgments that every other genre has been making for a while. It may be time to lift that moratorium.

It should be noted that there exists a variance among types of critics, thanks to the democratization of media through the use of the Internet. Writers like Peter Hum and Ben Ratliff, who are paid to write full-time about jazz, should cover a substantial breadth of jazz such that they are bound to write critical reviews in the course of their day-to-day writing duties. I like that I can count on Hum to opine on just about every significant new release.

But people like Patrick Jarenwattananon, Anthony Dean-Harris, Alex Rodriguez, and others whose jazz writing is only a part of what they do cannot so easily cover as many new releases and performances. Is it better for them to simply champion what they really love, and spend less energy on what they do not favor? Surely their readers are smart enough to figure out that they are not obnoxious fanboys, just writers who have chosen to expend their energy on the musicians who get their writerly juices flowing.

I will say, though, that one of the books which most stimulated me in the past few years was Stanley Crouch's anthology Considering Genius, mostly because I found myself disagreeing with him often. As a result, I had to interrogate my own rebuttals to his points, which made my arguments and thoughts about jazz much better articulated and deepened my understanding of why I like certain albums or artists so much. So perhaps a little negativity is in order. At the very least, the negative stuff can often be fun to write, if the writer is really into a takedown piece.

And which writers among us don't like giving a rhetorical smackdown every once in a while?

On Jazz Critics

Last week, the LA Times ran an interview with Wynton Marsalis, in which Wynton said of music critics:

A lot of times, reviewers don't really know enough about what you're doing to have an intelligent comment on it. It's hard to sit down and listen to something one time. A musician has worked on something, it has a lot of references, and it's full of things the reviewer doesn't know. A person doing a jazz review -- how much jazz do they know? How much symphonic music do they actually know? I understand the practical aspect of it. Yours is a piece they reviewed on Tuesday. They have a piece to review on Wednesday. I'm not mad at them.

Martin Williams had this to say about jazz criticism in 1989:

I think that the state of criticism of jazz in America is low, but I also think that the criticism of movies, plays, music in general, and painting is also low. Literature is lucky -- it has a top level of criticism which is an excellent counter to the average American book review.

The innate critical ability is not enough in itself. It needs to be trained, explored, disciplined, and tested like any other talent.

--

We have all heard it said that the criticism of jazz was once left to amateurs. That is not entirely true, nor is there any lack of amateurs today. But we do have now several writing about jazz who, although they really know what criticism is, don't know enough about music. On the other hand, there are some who know music, but don't know what criticism is. In jazz, of course, there is danger in knowing music since we are apt to apply the categories and standards of Western music rigidly and wrongly thereby. And there is also danger in knowing jazz: we may reject truly creative things because our knowledge of the past makes us think we know what a man ought to be doing [ed. note: Remind you of anyone, Wynton?] -- but that is true in any art.

The man who reviews jazz records has a terrible task: he can never, like his "classical" brother, judge an interpretation or performance against a norm because every jazz record is, in effect, a new work. Also, as George Orwell said of the hack book reviewer, day after day he must report on performances to which he has had little or no reaction worth committing to print -- and that is true of the best critics and is neither a reflection on them nor necessarily on the music.

On the other hand, there could not possibly be as much true creativity in jazz as we are constantly told there is, even though the medium is very much alive. How many novels, plays, poems, symphonies, paintings done in a year are really excellent?

-from Martin Williams, Jazz in Its Time

On "Best of 2010 So Far" Lists

No thanks. Isn't it bad enough that we make arbitrary lists once a year?

That is all.

Sunday Reading Material

Something to do between today's World Cup matches:

• Jazz Beyond Jazz blogger Howard Mandel drums up support for the Jazz Journalists Association's Jazz Awards at City Arts. The whole concept seems a little insidery, but it's just an awards show, so what's the worst that could happen? Mandel answers that question when he tells of the time he and Stanley Crouch almost got into a fistfight after the first JJA Awards (which would have been the lamest fight ever had it gone off).
• Our friends at Nextbop are looking to expand their operations and run some new projects, but first they need a little help financing. Chances are most Hot House readers have spent some time listening to the Nextplayer, so please help Seb, Anthony, and the rest of the Nextbop family out. You'll get an immediate return on your investment when you listen to Seb's radio interview with Christian Scott.
• Peter Hum made simple but very effective argument the other day: YouTube is the new DownBeat. The major jazz magazines still do many things well (they are still the best equipped to give us long-form profiles from the likes of David Adler and Nate Chinen), but they have yet to set up websites that are good enough to make me visit more than once a month or so...
• Speaking of jazz media, it's been over four months since jazz.com last posted new material. When it was running strong, jazz.com published some of the best content on the web (see for instance Steve Coleman's epic take on 12 essential Charlie Parker tracks and Chris Kelsey's piece on Ornette Coleman's Blue Note years). I miss it, and hope its days are not over.
• This isn't jazz related, but still worth a read. Roger Ebert offers a spirited and heartfelt defense of Twitter. Since I end up having to defend Twitter to a non-tweeting friend every two months or so, it was nice to see how a better writer than myself does it. Also, if you aren't on Twitter, you could follow only Ebert and still enjoy the service.
• I'll leave you with one final thought. In the early days of jazz it was common to see a slide-whistle used in jazz groups. With that in mind, I would love to see someone use a vuvuzela on their next album.

Must See TV From Across the Pond

 Christian Scott on BBC Breakfast:

At the risk of beating a dead horse, why can't I see interviews like this on American TV? Am I not watching the right channels at the right times?

H/t: @cscottjazz

Must Read

If you're snowed in like I am, take a look at David Hadju's New York Times essay on Fred Hersch's comeback. It is a detailed chronicle of Hersch's comeback from near death due to HIV complications, as well as an exploration of his style. It is worth your Sunday morning. However, I must quibble with his somewhat reductive take on the music of Hersch, Brad Mehldau, Vijay Iyer, and others. As Hadju describes it

A new movement in jazz has surfaced over the past few years — a wave of highly expressive music more concerned with emotion than with craft or virtuosity; a genre-blind music that casually mingles strains of pop, classical and folk musics from many cultures; an informal, elastic music unyielding to rigid conceptions of what jazz is supposed to be. It’s fair to call it "post-Marsalis," in that it leaves behind the defensive, canon-oriented musical conservatism of '90s jazz.

As a definition of the music for listeners not familiar with Hersch, this is an okay start. The value of emotional expression over all else works, and "post-Marsalis" gets the point across, but the whole definition feels a little anti-intellectual (which is most likely not his intent, I'm sure). Craft and virtuosity are still pretty important to Mehldau, Iverson, et al, but only as a means to an end, rather than an end itself. But that is but a minor disagreement in an otherwise solid piece.


Bonus: Follow it up with Nate Chinen's piece on Pat Metheny's new project, Orchestrion, along with some extra material on his blog.

Don't Be Afraid, The Clown's Afraid Too

Anthony Dean-Harris wrote a provocative post for Nextbop this week in which he poses a question: Is the jazz audience in America shrinking because potential new listeners are "turned off" by the arduous task of digesting the "imposing" history of the music? You should go read the full post, I'll wait.

--

I enjoyed seeing that someone else thinks about these things, and Anthony makes some good points here. More than almost any other kind of music, jazz is defined by its past, so much so that you may not even think of it as a living music if you didn't know any better.

However, I think Anthony veers off track when he writes, "They should hear the music of jazz’s past, not because it’s educational but because it’s entertaining in its own right." I do not disagree with his assertion, but rather I think that if we jazz enthusiasts are to help evangelize jazz, we will have to resist the temptation to recommend a laundry list of historical recordings as a means of introducing new listeners to the music (I'm not accusing Anthony of this, but merely trying to say we all should just back off a little bit). To draw on Anthony's analogy to rock music, I don't feel the need to couple a White Stripes recommendation with a Led Zeppelin album for historical perspective. I think the White Stripes catalog is good enough by itself without imploring someone to listen to the band's antecedents. Besides, anyone who wants to know more about the White Stripes' influences can easily get to Led Zeppelin on their own, and I think the analogy holds true if you were to replace the White Stripes and Led Zeppelin with Jason Moran and Jaki Byard.

The idea that history is an added burden to the task of expanding jazz listenership should not be discounted, not because jazz neophytes might be turned off by learning about the music's history, but because neophytes might already be buying into a specific master narrative of jazz that automatically dismisses the music as a museum piece. To put it another way, people do not ignore jazz because they don't want to learn about Duke Ellington or Miles Davis, they ignore jazz because they associate the music with dead people who are less likely to be relevant to them. This is one reason why A Blog Supreme's Jazz Now project was championed by so many other bloggers. At heart, we all understand that current jazz is thriving artistically, and that new listeners could easily love the music if we would just recommend something recorded by living musicians whose work contemporary world.


BONUS MATERIAL: Anthony's post reminded me of a thread that run's through Art Taylor's wonderful collection of interviews, Notes and Tones. Taylor asks each of his interviewees, including Miles Davis, Max Roach, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, what they think about the word "jazz," eliciting all manners of discursive thoughts on the word and its not insignificant impact on the lives of individual musicians. If you haven't read this, it is worth an afternoon of your time, you can find a copy in the stacks of any college library with a decent music department, and some public libraries (or you could just shell out the ten bucks for your own copy).

Media Criticism

On Friday, Seth Colter Walls made a suggestion on The Awl for NBC programming executives, who are in the middle of a bit of a crisis: Put some jazz on television. His point was obscured at times by a sheepish affectation, but I'll agree with his sentiment: "I was getting pretty excited about the show that somebody could put on TV, if they had the time on hand to hand around to people who know how to spend it."

In other news...

• NYC Winter Jazzfest was a rousing success, according to most observers. Read thoughts on the festival from Ben Ratliff, Nate Chinen, Hank Shteamer, Jim Macnie, Jacob Teichroew, and Alex Rodriguez.
• I've never been shy about my distaste for Richard Nixon, and now I have some new ammunition. So perhaps Wynton is more like Nixon than Reagan, no?
• Jason Crane interviewed the man behind Open Sky Jazz and The Independent Ear, Willard Jenkins, last month. Other recent highlights from The Jazz Session include interviews with Chris Potter and Nathaniel Friedman of the basketball blog Free Darko.
• On A Blog Supreme, Felix Contreras offers to help fill the President's iPod. Later in the week, Matt Wilson penned a remembrance for Ed Thigpen.
  
• Finally, Matt Merewitz of Fully Altered Media live tweeted some clips from Ethan Iverson and the Respect Sextet's respective sets January 12 at Le Poisson Rouge.
  

First, Ethan plays Stella by Starlight:

The Respect Sextet playing Furry With A Syringe on Top:

How Not To Write Jazz Criticism

I'm a bit late to the party, but perhaps you've heard about this review of the Maria Schneider Orchestra's recent performance at the Ottawa Jazz Festival. It has everything jazz critics should avoid: including blatant misogyny, focusing on the histrionics of the performance instead of the actual music, and disdain for other members of the audience. Needless to say, it sparked a good deal of criticism from commenters at the Montreal Gazette (who published the review) and jazz bloggers.

James Hale said it best: "So, on behalf of professional jazz journalists everywhere: Thanks, Jeff. You just set back our cause beyond measure." At Rifftides, Doug Ramsey adds:

As jazz magazines go out of business and coverage budgets at general circulation publications dry up, one part of conventional journalism wisdom is that the web, specifically bloggers on the web, will take up the slack. Please don't let it disturb you if I point out that most bloggers work for nothing more than the challenge, the thrill, the contacts or the loss-leading benefits of using their blogs as adjuncts to whatever they do for a living. It would be a mistake to count on them (us) to provide the standards and oversight that print publishers are unwilling or unable to observe and practice. In journalism as in the rest of life, generally you get what you pay for.

I can't say I totally share Doug's pessimism. Bloggers (especially in the realms of sports and politics) have become notorious for their reputations as curmudgeonly spewers of invective and poor (and often absent) fact-checking (whether or not they deserve these reputations is another argument altogether that I will avoid here). However, being that jazz occupies a niche space in our culture, it seems to me that most jazz bloggers write mostly out of their love for the music. While this does not guarantee that dreck such as this Heinrich review will not appear from time to time, I like to think (perhaps too optimistically) that these bloggers-cum-enthusiasts will tend to govern themselves according to the standards of civility to which conventional journalists are held by their editors.

Meanwhile, this criticism of big band jazz made the rounds last week. I'll defer to Darcy James Argue and Ian of Villes Ville on their rebuttals to the piece; they defend big band jazz with passion and more effectively than I could hope to. Besides, I mention it here not to criticize Matt Rubin, the writer of the post, but rather point out that while his argument is critical, he does not resort to the nastiness of Heinrich's piece. He keeps a level head and stays focused on the music, in the way that I think most jazz bloggers (who actually care about jazz) would.

Lastly, I beg of you, my readers: please do not hesitate to put me in my place if I ever write something so terrible as Heinrich's takedown of Maria Schneider.

Now, in order for us all to cool off, let's watch a YouTube of Charles Lloyd with John Abercrombie, Marc Johnson, and Billy Hart.

Pat Metheny Just Blew My Mind

This week in The Guardian, Pat Metheny had this to say about Ornette Coleman (emphasis added):

There's no compromise with Ornette - you have to go into his yard to play.When we recorded the 1986 album Song X together, we wanted to make something unlike anything either of us had done before. I think we created something unique. He is one of the most beautiful souls on the planet, a truly gentle person as funny as he is deep. But I don't think I ever got to understand "harmolodics." When musicians talk about it like they know what it means, I listen warily. When a critic does, you can be sure he's full of it.

No idea? Metheny is the last person I would expect to say this, but now I feel a lot better about not understanding it.


h/t: A Blog Supreme

This May Explain Why They Never Sent Me That Free DVD With My Subscription...

Howard Mandel alerted us that Jazz Times might be shutting its doors, and on Monday, the jazz magazine posted the following on its website:

To our readers and members of the jazz community:

JazzTimes has temporarily suspended publication of the magazine and has furloughed the bulk of its staff while it finalizes a sale of its assets. The brand and operation will undergo reorganization and restructuring in order to remain competitive in the current media climate. Print publishing is expected to resume as soon as a sale is closed. New information and statements will be posted at www.jazztimes.com as they become available.

Thank you for your patience during this challenging period.

JazzTimes Management

While I am genuinely disappointed to see JazzTimes go (even if it is only temporary), the fact is there are plenty of other outlets for jazz news and criticism on the web. Even in the jazz blogosphere, a tiny neighborhood on the web comparatively, you can find great jazz content from journalists, musicians, traditional media outlets, and even amateurs (including yours truly). The end of JazzTimes may be a bit of a shock right now, but the music, and the accompanying background noise, will play on.


Other views on JazzTimes:
Marc Myers
Howard Mandel
Doug Ramsey
James Hale
Ted Gioia and Alan Kurtz debate the situation in the comments of this post.

Must Read

I don't read much architectural criticism at all, but I always read every new Witold Rybczynski piece in Slate. His ability to offer informed criticism accessible to novices like me is a standard for which I strive here on this blog. Yesterday, Mr. Rybczynski posted a thought-provoking piece on the maddening dogmatism of architectural "schools" which caused me to take pause. Paraphrasing Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale school of architecture, Rybczynski passes on this nugget:

Architecture students should be exposed to the widest possible range of contemporary ideas in order to find their own way. In the process, they will learn the most important lesson of architectural history: There are no right and wrong styles, only well- and poorly conceived buildings.

Well put, indeed. In an environment where artists and critics turn simple disagreements over style into armed conflicts (think of the Jazz Wars), it is important for us to remember that though the stakes may seem high, let's keep our cool.

Review

The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music
Ben Ratliff

Ben Ratliff knows something about jazz musicians. Having interviewed many during his years as a journalist, Ratliff has discovered that when a jazz musician is being interviewed by a journalist, the musician tends to "talk to a reporter about his or her own life in a way that mostly serves a product or benefits other people," i.e. a new album or the musician's record label. The musician puts up a facade for the sake of selling the new album or promoting a gig, and thus often comes across kind of superficial or disinterested.

However, Ratliff some time ago discovered that he could truly open up a musician by asking him or her to listen to some music with him and use the listening experience as a way of engaging in music criticism with the musician. By doing so, Ratliff found that he could learn more about his interviewees than he ever could by following the traditional guidelines of the musician interview.

Anyone who has read an interview with a jazz musician in Down Beat, Jazz Times, or the like has undoubtedly finished a piece disappointed more than once. What sometimes passes for interviews is nothing more than questions about how a musician feels about his sidemen or early influences, except the musician often does so in a way that reveals little about his or her music. After reading so many jazz interviews that left no impression on me at all, my interest was certainly piqued when I read Ratliff's explanation of his new interview method in The Jazz Ear, a collection of his "Listening With" series for the New York Times. Featuring interviews with a broad array of jazz musicians, including Sonny Rollins, Paul Motian, and Maria Schneider, I can honestly say that I learned more about the way jazz musicians approach their craft in this book than I could in a year of reading Down Beat or Jazz Times.

Ratliff asked each of his interview subjects to bring or suggest a list of recorings which they would want to listen to and discuss with Ratliff. There was no discussion about the latest album or gig, just the music at hand. Unfettered by the demands of promotion, the interviewees open up about style, harmony, and rhythm. The juicy bits are too numerous to mention, but one highlight for me certainly was Pat Metheny's criticism of the “creeping academicism in jazz,” and his explanation of the dichotomy between jazz as a quantifiable language created in the past and jazz as an invented language incorporating the quantified language of the past with “the materials, the tools, the spirit” of contemporary vernacular. This is not the kind of rumination you can find in most interviews.

However riveting the book was, though, I could not escape the feeling that these interviews are being presented in the wrong format. As the old saw goes, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."¹ Though these pieces were originally written for print media, surely the tapes of these conversations, regardless of the sound quality, would be captivating to listen to. Ratliff periodically writes sentences beginning, "On the fourth listening of the track, X said Y." It would be interesting to me to listen to any of these musicians dissect the music they chose for these interviews upon repeated listenings, picking apart the layers of the music they chose.

For anyone willing to dig around the New York Times archives, some audio samples of these interviews are available with the original Times pieces (the Branford Marsalis interview, for instance, is available here). This may sate your curiosity a bit, but to me, this project is practically begging for a different medium than print. Imagine edited audio files of the interviews available as podcasts. Times Books (who published the book) could even charge for them on the iTunes store. But none of this should detract from what is a wildly entertaining and insightful collection. Ratliff has established himself as one of the leading jazz critics of the new century, and this book certainly enhances his critical reputation.


BONUS: Bop and Beyond recently posted an interview with Ratliff. Read it here.

¹ I've seen this phrase attributed both to Thelonious Monk and Elvis Costello, among others. If anyone knows the actual origin of this phrase (and can cite it), I would greatly appreciate it if you could pass it on to me.

List: Indispensable Jazz Blogs

When I first started writing this blog, I decided to search the vast interwebs for some inspiration. Though I already had a couple of jazz blogs in my reader, I soon discovered that there are plenty of great blogs out there that I did not know about. Since it took me awhile to scour the internet for these blogs (not to mention sifting through the tons of jazz blogs that turn up on a Google search that are no longer active), I thought I'd list some of my most essential reading here on the blog.

Two notes on this list:

1. As important as they are, I have not included sites like AllAboutJazz or Jazz.com since they are technically not blogs (though Jazz.com hosts a blog).
2. This list is by no means exhaustive. I have not included every blog I read or have seen, and any omissions are not meant as slights. Instead, I'd like this list to serve as a jumping off point for any potential readers out there. The sidebar on my blog or any of these other blogs has even more links to pursue, so don't limit yourself to the list below.

Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, on to the list, in alphabetical order.

• Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, in which Darcy James Argue comments on the goings-on of the jazz world while updating you on the goings-on of his Secret Society.
  
• Destination: OUT. If you're new to avant-garde and free jazz and need someone to hold your hand while you explore this corner of the jazz world, then this site is for you. Proprietors Chilly Jay Chill and Prof. Drew LeDrew provide tons of samples of rare or out-of-print music and discuss their finds with the readers. Seeing a new D:O post in my reader is always a treat, like opening the first present on Christmas morning.
  
• Do The Math. DTM is a blog run by Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, with occasional contributions from Dave King and Reid Anderson. Since The Bad Plus are on the road so often, the blog can often go awhile without updates. But when the updates come, they come big, see this epic 18,000-word post on Lennie Tristano from March of this year.
  
• Fred Kaplan. Besides being a top-notch foreign affairs columnist for Slate, Fred Kaplan is an avid jazz buff who blogs for Stereophile. Unfortunately, Stereophile does not provide an RSS feed for Kaplan's blog. Get with the program, Stereophile!
  
• Greenleaf Music Blog. Another great musician's blog. Dave Douglas runs the shop here, with contributions from various coconspirators.
  
• Jazz Beyond Jazz. Run by estimable Howard Mandel, Jazz Beyond Jazz covers the New York scene, among others.
  
• Jazz Lives. I only tuned into this one recently, but it has quickly become a must-read. Blogger Michael Steinman recently dug up a letter from Sonny Rollins to Coleman Hawkins for the blog.
  

On The Jazz Press and Media Criticism

A mini-controversy erupted in the jazz blogosphere this week, as Anthony Medici at the Princeton Record Exchange Blog wrote a brief screed against the jazz media, specifically JazzTimes and Down Beat. His criticism elicited a response from Lee Mergner, the Editor-in-Chief at JazzTimes [Full Disclosure: I currently subscribe to JazzTimes and have subscribed to Down Beat in the past]. To recap:

• On Sunday, Medici accused the jazz press of "feeding from the public relations trough," or pushing the new model, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Crouch. He argues that if both JazzTimes and Down Beat issue cover stories on the same artist (he uses the recent example of David Sanborn), then this is likely a case of both magazines being "driven by the PR- flack- hype - machine" (sic). This is also the case if either magazine writes a cover story on an musician of limited artistic merit, according to Medici (he uses a story on the Return to Forever reunion as an example). He also takes the magazines to task for poor editing and poor writing, comparing both to the golden age of Down Beat (which I'll define as the mid 1950s to late 1960s), when critics like Leonard Feather, Ira Gitler, Don DeMichael, and Nat Hentoff were creating the form of jazz criticism as a highly literate and informed discipline. He concludes that these magazines are in fact bad for jazz because they are so industry-driven and badly written.

• Later this week, Lee Mergner of JazzTimes responded to these charges on a listserv post reproduced on the Night Lights blog. He first argued that just because recent cover stories on Return To Forever, Esperanza Spaulding, and Freddie Hubbard also coincided with new album releases does not make those stories irrelevant from an artistic standpoint. He also notes that the magazine recently featured the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk on its cover, which works against Medici's argument. He added that nostalgia for older issues of Down Beat hides the fact that there was plenty of bad writing during the magazine's heyday (a point to which I can attest, having read every issue of the magazine published between 1955 and 1972). Though JazzTimes obviously has room for improvement, Mergner argues that the magazine is better than the critics suggest. In a media environment that rarely pays any attention to jazz, Mergner points out, it is ludicrous to suggest that a magazine that so avidly promotes jazz and features preeminent critics like Hentoff, Gary Giddins, and Nate Chinen bad for jazz. He closes, "As my teenaged daughter would say, 'whatever.' Or, as stated in a quote often attributed to LBJ, 'Any jackass can burn down a barn, but it takes a helluva carpenter to build one.' "
  

Night Lights added its (valuable) two cents, pointing out that if JazzTimes is not your bag, there are plenty of great writers discussing jazz in the blogosphere, like Ted Gioia at jazz.com and Doug Ramsey at ArtsJournal, not to mention jazz musicians with blogs like Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus and Darcy James Argue.

It seems that both sides have made their arguments and the controversy (for lack of a better term) will soon die down. However, I feel a few important points need to be made about the jazz press, blogs, and media criticism:

1. It must be noted that magazines like JazzTimes and Down Beat rely on advertising from record companies to help keep their magazines profitable. Even in the best of times, subscriber and newsstand revenue alone cannot keep a magazine in business. However, that doesn't mean these magazines are in the pocket of record companies. Artistry and commercial viability are NOT mutually exclusive. And even in the case of a cover story that veers to the more commercially viable side of this bipolar construction, there are still plenty of places to find good criticism in JazzTimes, including the monthly columns from Hentoff, Giddins, and Chinen, the record reviews, and the Before and After feature (JazzTimes' verison of the blindfold test). As the saying goes, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
   
2. That being said, I think bloggers are in an excellent position to offer valid and (hopefully) constructive media criticism. This kind of thing happens all the time in the worlds of sports and politics (see for instance, this post from Deadspin criticizing ESPN for inconsistent treatment of two network personalities who made separate unfortunate and ill-advised references to Adolph Hitler). However, such media criticism needs to be done responsibly for it to be effective. Bringing up a good point, then burying it under tired analogies and exaggerated claims tends to hurt the critic's credibility rather than bring light to any legitimate grievance. So let's play nice and keep it professional, okay?
   
3. In the complex media environment we inhabit today, it is ludicrous to write of a monolithic "Jazz Press" or assign excess agency to large periodicals like JazzTimes. Even if the people at JazzTimes wanted to be "bad for jazz," how would such a fringe publication (in the grand scheme of things) accomplish that, anyway?
   
4. As Night Lights points out, if JazzTimes and Down Beat are not up to your preferences, there are plenty of great alternatives on the internet. You can start with the links on the sidebar of this page. We live in a free market, and sometimes the best way to make yourself heard is by using your wallet (which is why I buy free-range vegetarian-fed eggs, but that's another story for another blog).

That's all for now. I will be back to the music soon...

h/t: Night Lights blog

UPDATE: At Jazz Chronicles, James Hale, a regular contributor to Down Beat, weighs in on the feud, mostly debunking Medici's fetishization of the 1950s-60s as a golden age of jazz journalism.