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Is there some trouble at Coda?


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The last two issues have been really late. I didn't get November/December until yesterday (with a postmark of December 19 so it's not all their fault--but if it wasn't sent til then it's rather odd they included all sorts of Christmas gift promotions). I know there is new ownership, but I wonder if there aren't some deeper problems to cause such massive delays.

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Good question. The mag is actually in better shape than it has been for a long while, with a new publisher (Mark Barnes) who is getting behind it in a way that Warwick Publishing never did. The Sep/Oct delay was caused by a shift of printing facilities, I gather, & this seems to have compounded the lateness of the Nov/Dec issue. I haven't the faintest how they plan to get back on track by this point, which seems to me urgent--it leaves subscribers scratching their heads when issues are consistently 2 months late. -- Not that it was very on-time before--I recall that Stuart Broomer had to play catchup at one point by doing a double Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb issue!

Anyway, the new one looks good--the main features are on Satoko Fujii & Gerald Wilson, so a bit of a focus on big bands.

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Good question. The mag is actually in better shape than it has been for a long while, with a new publisher (Mark Barnes) who is getting behind it in a way that Warwick Publishing never did. The Sep/Oct delay was caused by a shift of printing facilities, I gather, & this seems to have compounded the lateness of the Nov/Dec issue. I haven't the faintest how they plan to get back on track by this point, which seems to me urgent--it leaves subscribers scratching their heads when issues are consistently 2 months late. -- Not that it was very on-time before--I recall that Stuart Broomer had to play catchup at one point by doing a double Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb issue!

Anyway, the new one looks good--the main features are on Satoko Fujii & Gerald Wilson, so a bit of a focus on big bands.

Thanks. The magazine does look good, but I always wish that there was more content, but from the old back issues I buy off ebay I gather it has always been a bit on the thin side.

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The pagecount hasn't changed for years; though I think that there was still much more wordcount per issue in the Norris/Smith days because they concentrated on packing in a lot of material without many visuals or ads (in fact, in the backissues I was consulting a few weeks back at the library, I recall virtually no ads in the early 1990s issues, aside from the classifieds at the back). That said, when I last talked to him, Mark Barnes did say that they were contemplating an increased pagecount in the future. Fingers crossed.

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  • 2 years later...

Rucsh used to have a record company out of the same building. Once I sent a demo, trying to get a date. He sent back an opinion, and not a good one. Said the bassist took more chances than me, and since I had the 'chops' why not? (I take chances all the time, and have not much chops)

I replied by sending him a Q-tip....

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Rucsh used to have a record company out of the same building. Once I sent a demo, trying to get a date. He sent back an opinion, and not a good one. Said the bassist took more chances than me, and since I had the 'chops' why not? (I take chances all the time, and have not much chops)

I replied by sending him a Q-tip....

Big confusion here. Cadence is the Rusch operation and Coda was originally operated by John Norris and Bill Smith. Their label is called Sackville.

Back to the woodshed.

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Rucsh used to have a record company out of the same building. Once I sent a demo, trying to get a date. He sent back an opinion, and not a good one. Said the bassist took more chances than me, and since I had the 'chops' why not? (I take chances all the time, and have not much chops)

I replied by sending him a Q-tip....

Big confusion here. Cadence is the Rusch operation and Coda was originally operated by John Norris and Bill Smith. Their label is called Sackville.

Back to the woodshed.

Actually, Sackville is exclusively Norris' label, and has been for about a decade. Bill Smith still does the graphic work, but Norris owns the imprint. (He should get up to the late 20th Century and get online, but he chooses not to. Fax is the most up-to-date technology he has embraced.)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest Bill Barton

Up again

As a regular contributor for quite some time now I'm as much in the dark as anyone. And I'd really, really like to find out what's going on. I haven't seen my copy of the issue with the 2008 Top Tens yet and haven't received any response to an e-mail I sent weeks ago to Andrew Scott (it was sent to the CODA editor e-mail address that is on their masthead.) I used to have Andy's home e-addy but during the month-and-a-half period when I was PC-less my Hotmail account went dead-in-the-water. So around 300 music biz contacts built up over more than a decade disappeared - poof! - into digital limbo. Luckily I have a CSV file of the older ones, but some of the newer ones are really in limbo. Sigh...

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I have an update. I took things into my own hands and called the 888 toll-free number, and the man who answered the phone (Mark Fisher?) told me that a May/June issue was coming by the end of May, and that they would get back on schedule after that. I was more surprised that someone answered the phone--I was certain the magazine was defunct. We'll wait and see what happens. I'm not optimistic in this economy.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Guest Bill Barton

I finally managed to get in touch with Mark via telephone today and had a relatively lengthy conversation. The postponed issues will eventually see the light of day. Mark didn't specify a timetable, but the magazine is definitely still in existence and in the process of restructuring a number of things. We just all need to be patient...

Edited by Bill Barton
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

The website is dead. While I was in Montreal for Mutek earlier this year, I picked up a copy of La Scena Musicalewhich was not an adequate substituteby any means. I checked out the French jazz magazines (Jazz Hot and Jazz) there too, and found them surprisingly like Gallic Jazzwises--i.e., glossy-looking. But since I don't read French I couldn't tell you if their content was the same, although they didn't look like the dozen-page post-modern Marxian critical theory treatises on avant-garde figures I was hoping from the French.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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