Bad news. Howard Mandel has more.
Read this article about Ira Sabin, the founder, pictured above with Dizzy Gillespie.
Hopefully JazzTimes will reboot. If it doesn’t, every emerging artist of significant stature has one less way to gain exposure. How can you build a career these days if you don’t have magazines to write about you? The internet is not the only answer. I know for a fact that I reached a whole other audience with my piece on TBP and classical music this past March: all sorts of people who would never read DTM saw it in the pages of JazzTimes.
I’m fairly certain that the collapse of JazzTimes can be considered part of the same wave of systemic failure that took down IAJE last year. There’s positive aspects to jazz education, but I do worry about how corporate and money-driven it can seem, especially now that the bubble has burst. As we all know, not only do young players fresh out of jazz college have trouble finding gigs, but for musicians of all ages the current market is completely over-saturated, making it extraordinarily difficult for anything to have any economic value whatsoever.
Whenever I opened a recent issue of JazzTimes, it felt like a glossy, corporate ad for jazz education. Admittedly, I don’t have any fact and figures here: I don’t know for sure that a large percentage of the magazine ran on ads and subscribers connected not to basic jazz fans or jazz scholars, but only to the jazz education machine. But corporations follow the money no matter what and shut operations down when the pump is dry. I strongly believe that if JazzTimes had just been about jazz, not about the machine, it could have struggled on, just like jazz always has.
Of course, whatever educational or corporate connections the magazine had, there was still plenty of good about it. In particular, the forums for smart writers like Gary Giddins, Nate Chinen, and Nat Hentoff were admirable. Those columns reminded me of JazzTimes in the 1980’s, which might have been the magazine’s glory days, when the rag was printed on newspaper stock like a fanzine and arrived in your mailbox folded up and bent. (JazzTimes became a glossy in 1990, and I’m pretty sure Sabin’s hands-on involvement become less.) I loved JazzTimes then: it was cheap, it was weird, it was passionate. The first column was Apple Chorus by Ira Gitler, who reported on all the bandstand activity he had seen in New York that month. (How avidly I read of Chet Baker getting so grumpy about his evening’s pianist that Kenny Kirkland took off mid-set to be replaced by another musician in the house, Michel Petrucciani.) I can’t remember another writer’s name, but still recall his long, balanced review of a reissue of Constant Lambert’s 1934 book What Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. (That was an article that really got the advertisers excited.) Occasionally Martin Williams would show up ostentatiously and argue that Eric Dolphy was greater than John Coltrane. (Therefore, Williams would wonder, why wasn’t Dolphy more influential than Coltrane?) And the biggest, most prominent ads were for jazz cruises, not jazz colleges.
After reading the old JazzTimes, you would think about jazz.
The last thing you would do would be to consider a career in it.
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I like jazz. Indeed, I collect jazz records and constantly read about it the way other men my age play with model trains. Despite this passion, I didn’t read JazzTimes much recently in the last few years. (There surely was great stuff that I missed - sincere apologies to writers that feel slighted.)
However, I do have a current replacement for the old JazzTimes. It’s Jazz.com run by Ted Gioia. Like the old JazzTimes, it is not very “cool”: I can’t send a well-adjusted 17-year old there and expect them to be very impressed. But Gioia likes jazz just like me. In addition to having a large stable of contributors, Gioia himself is interesting to read, for example when he ruminates about the absence of Charlie Parker’s language in today’s scene or documenting his dedicated pursuit of the elusive Dupree Bolton. (Arrgh - I was working on this post before Gioia just now put TBP in some nice company. Honestly, I’m not paying him back, and I’ve never met him. I did write a piece for Jazz.com on stride pianists, but my contact was the estimable Ted Panken - I didn’t really follow Gioia at that point. Help! I’ll leave this part in anyway.)
Jazz.com is free, so I'm not sure if Gioia is making any money from it. I would support him charging admission, and I suspect that he is trying to build enough readership to do so. (I’d pay for it myself whether TBP was reviewed there or not.) But I’m certain that Gioia knows damn well that even if he started charging, no-one is going to get rich off of Jazz.com. It’s jazz, after all. The music will survive only because people want to do it and for no other reason.
If JazzTimes does get going again, they should focus on the same kind of humble, music-first agenda that Jazz.com has.
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Some good news: The New York Times is still backing Ben Ratliff's non-mainstream exploration of the new drums. (Vol. one from ten years ago is here.) Patrick Jarenwattananon (who I have met and is a good guy) has started a jazz blog at NPR. And the internet does offer the chance for something like this interview of John Murph by Willard Jenkins to get published (there's no way JazzTimes would have run it). I am sure Murph is correct in everything he says. Let's keep airing out this topic and discovering the truth, huh?
