jazz critics have problems, too(from 1983)

[alocispepraluger102]

critics have problems, too

"Jazz writers are a bunch of kids who don’t know anything about the music; also, they are a bunch of old men who haven’t liked anything new since Bird died. They live to put musicians down; this explains why they let record companies bribe them (sometimes outright, sometimes through paying them to do liner notes) never to write anything negative about anybody. By this means, among others, jazz writers get rich off the work of musicians. Nobody publishes in jazz magazines worth reading, though, because there isn’t any audience that will pay to read one.

Quite a few people who like jazz don’t like jazz writers. Some resent it when any of us dislikes anything about jazz. A surlier and somewhat larger group is more demanding: they want us to extol all the music they like and detest all the music they detest, and they send a stream of letters to jazz reviewers. Others seem to fell that we could improve world conditions by taking professional vows of poverty. A more sympathetic lot merely wishes that we were better at what we do: more careful, more thoughtful, less devoted to profiles and capsule reviews and more inclined to serious analysis. This group may or may not be outnumbered by those who find the very nature of our work useless at best, harmful at worst. The caricature at the head of this column is a thoroughly unfair composite of opinions from members of all these groups. I will now demonstrate that every word of it is true."

[David Ayers]

We discussed this at length in a dedicated thread.

[alocispepraluger102]

We discussed this at length in a dedicated thread.

apologies