Ben Ratliff

[Randy Twizzle]

there's an online interview with ratliff where he's asked how he got his first job at the Times.

Steven: How did you get a full-time job writing about music for the NYT?

Ben: I took a cultural criticism class with Gary Giddins while I was at Columbia--he taught for a few semesters in the General Studies school there--and it was one of the best things I ever did. About five years later I was unhappily working in book publishing, and as a sideline I filled in for Gary at the Voice when he went on sabbatical, writing articles about jazz and all those weekly choices and so forth. Around that time Peter Watrous and Jon Pareles started looking around for a stringer to join the Times, and there I was, ready to quit my day job at a moment's notice.

http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/benratliff.html

[Christiern]

Wish he'd kept his day job.

[ghost of miles]

Okrent's a joke. He didn't say squat when the Times fired a city stringer because he'd been a spokesperson for ACT-UP years ago... and he wasn't even covering gay-beat issues. Yet they keep Judy Miller, who belongs to a neocon think tank, on as a foreign-policy reporter. Talk about conflict of interest!

[kdd]

I was actually kicking around started a thread about how bad I found Ratliff's writing this week and that was before reading the Moran piece. There's this from a Geri Allen review earlier this week.

"Ms. Allen is squarely in the tradition of the jazz piano's high modern mainstream, deeply influenced by Herbie Hancock. This week she's using a drummer from that same old-school era, Jimmy Cobb"

What the fuck!!! Herbie and Jimmy Cobb from the same era. I guess he thinks all that old stuff is the same.

and this from a review of a Michael Brecker concert last week.

"It has a brass section, including a French horn (Peter Gordon). There is no saxophone section per se; instead, there is one musician playing oboe and English horn (Dan Willis), one playing bass clarinet and baritone saxophone (Roger Rosenberg), one playing soprano saxophone and flute (Bob Sheppard)"

No mistakes per se but it struck me as grade school writing at best.

To me he also says a lot of questionable things in the Moran piece as well. Has he always been this bad or just raising it to new heights lately?

[keys]

I went to hear Jason and the Bandwagon last night(sat).To these ears most of what I heard was quite enjoyable .I had the feeling that the band was engaged in what they were playing and far from "neutral".I might add that Eric Mcpherson was on the drums last night instead of Nasheet Waits.Could it have been Nasheet who caused the music to be rendered neutral to Mr Ratliff ?