Re: Re: Critics (was: Re: Freak In)
At 05:10 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, Steve Smith wrote:
There are actually quite a large number of grassroots jazz tabloids, from New York's All About Jazz to similar efforts from Vermont to Los Angeles. Those strike me as being far closer to zine culture than to mainstream press.
Names! We need more names!
All I know is that when I was fresh out of college and back in Houston, I wanted to start such a zine myself, but lacked the manhours in which to do it. Story of my life.
We're all the poorer for this. Rekindle this dream again some day, young man... At 03:46 PM 3/18/2003 -0800, skip Heller wrote:
Thinking about this myself, I just wonder if the whole DIY ethic of >punk music carried over easily to writing/publishing angle of it.
I don't think it did if you mean in terms of jazz writing. Jazz reportage is measurably older than rock journalism, so the recipe was more firmly in place. The style was more firmly establish.
True. I was talking in terms of rock only here. I do wonder why some indie label jazz didn't inspire more zines though.
Even to this day, how many print jazz zines are there out there besides Signal To Noise? I'm sure I'm forgetting some but I don't think that there's many. Hope I'm wrong though.
There are a few, but just try finding 'em. WIRE & DOWNBEAT still rule, largely because they're not hard to find.
It might be semantics but can we really call these 'zines'? I think of more homegrown efforts like STN as being zines. Wire and Downbeat happen to be very good, important publications but circulation-wise, ad-wise, etc., they're not on the same level as STN.
Pop is youth-orientated/driven so I think editors are conscious that their writers don't make the publication seem old-fashioned (unless of course you're publishing a garage zine for instance).
I think that's true with anything dominated by young people.
I wonder how that relates to jazz and its audience then. If we're going to assume that it's usually an older audience, then this isn't an issue. Can we also assume that the younger audience that is there respects history enough not to be automatically woo'd by the newest stars/flavor-of-the-month?
... if editors would think that it'd be more important to devote the space to more reviews rather than multiple perspectives on a few controversial releases.
They might do it for Krall or Norah. But for Matthew Shipp, I don't think so.
Agreed but I do think that, nowadays esp., it's more important to cram reviews into an ever-shrinking space than to consider multiple-perspectives (hence why we see them rarely, if at all). Best, Jason Perfect Sound Forever online music magazine with warped perspectives perfect-sound@furious.com http://www.perfectsoundforever.com
on 3/18/03 4:59 PM, Perfect Sound Forever at perfect-sound@furious.com wrote:
At 05:10 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, Steve Smith wrote:
There are actually quite a large number of grassroots jazz tabloids, from New York's All About Jazz to similar efforts from Vermont to Los Angeles. Those strike me as being far closer to zine culture than to mainstream press.
Names! We need more names!
there are a bunch of webzines more eclectic in nature -- cosmik debris, rootdown, jazzitude, jazz review, jazz corner, but I wouldn't really say any of them is to this era what Slash magazine was to 1980. The paradigm has shifted. The contemporary counterculture is quite often like a training league for the mainstream, and a great many of these webzines and tabloids do not have the overt edge that came with the first two waves of punk rock (except rootdown, which is really right out of the graffiti culture). Vibe looks more like Cosmopolitan than Creem, even with Tupac on the cover. I'd say the best of these mags/webzines is akin to what college radio would have been like if it hasn't been co-opted into an enormous tool of the major labels. And let us not forget that the digital nature of the media makes it inherently cleaner. I was looking at some old SEARCH & DESTROY mags last week, and was amazed at how damn rustic they were. The whole desktop publishing revolution has made clean graphics available to everyone. No more kidnap typesetting... sigh. Dang. if anyone needs me, I'll be listening to every record Stiff put out before 1979. And wondering what happened to my youth. -- skip h http://www.skipheller.com
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skip Heller