Jazz Times -- no white writers admitted now? per Nate Chinen

[Larry Kart]

Have you seen the May issue of JazzTimes? Does that feel like a loaded question?

My copy arrived in today’s mail. A NEW ERA, declares the cover — a bold headline that’s objectively true, though things get more subjective once you turn the page. In the event that you haven’t been following the saga of “America’s Jazz Magazine,” its new owner, Gregory Charles Royal, is eager to bring you up to speed.

Upgrade to paid

In an introductory manifesto, Royal writes: “As I say my peace [sic], I want you all to imagine a world in which Black writers, as a matter of course and almost exclusively, provide the critique, opinion and coverage of White jazz artists and their music. Scary, huh?” He goes on to affirm his own foothold within the music (“My Cred”), drop dozens of names in a word cloud (“Kevin Bacon Ain’t Got Sh%^ on Me!”), and finally, nurse a core grievance (“The Result of an Untreated Wound”). Here’s the top:

This publication has lived in an insular bubble for decades — a magazine seemingly written for the consumption and from the perspective of white journalists (often themselves wannabe jazz musicians) who have had no interest in appealing to a general public. A wankfest of the highest order, largely undertaken and overtaken by white people at the expense of cultivating a legacy amongst jazz's primary heirs — past and future Black generations.

These writers, aka the gatekeepers, historically worked on a tab until this Black man said get the fuck out — now they want their money yesterday and are losing their fucking minds all over social media.

Later in the issue, there are four pages of tweets critical of JazzTimes and its new direction, all stamped w

In an introductory manifesto, Royal writes: “As I say my peace [sic], I want you all to imagine a world in which Black writers, as a matter of course and almost exclusively, provide the critique, opinion and coverage of White jazz artists and their music. Scary, huh?” He goes on to affirm his own foothold within the music (“My Cred”), drop dozens of names in a word cloud (“Kevin Bacon Ain’t Got Sh%^ on Me!”), and finally, nurse a core grievance (“The Result of an Untreated Wound”). Here’s the top:

This publication has lived in an insular bubble for decades — a magazine seemingly written for the consumption and from the perspective of white journalists (often themselves wannabe jazz musicians) who have had no interest in appealing to a general public. A wankfest of the highest order, largely undertaken and overtaken by white people at the expense of cultivating a legacy amongst jazz's primary heirs — past and future Black generations.

These writers, aka the gatekeepers, historically worked on a tab until this Black man said get the fuck out — now they want their money yesterday and are losing their fucking minds all over social media.

Later in the issue, there are four pages of tweets critical of JazzTimes and its new direction, all stamped with an exultant kiss-off. Like the cryptic slug at the top of Royal’s note — RIP the April 2023 Issue — it’s all so inside-baseball that I can only imagine what the experience is for a reader with no knowledge of What Went Down.

May 2023 issue of JazzTimes. The “good-bye!” [sic] stamps are printed on the page.

Cards on the table: I haven’t been actively associated with JazzTimes for a handful of years, but I have a lot of history with the magazine, where I began writing features and reviews around the turn of the century. The Gig ran as a monthly column there for more than a dozen years, beginning with the May 2004 issue.

The previous year, JazzTimes had ended Stanley Crouch’s tenure as a columnist — a reprisal, he claimed, for his scathing column “Putting the White Man in Charge.” Crouch’s polemic was recently anthologized by veteran jazz journalist Willard Jenkins in a vital book titled Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story. So was another essay even more germane to this discussion, Amiri Baraka’s “Jazz and the White Critic,” first published in DownBeat almost 60 years ago. Baraka, then still writing as LeRoi Jones, opened that essay with a lucid provocation: “Most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most important jazz musicians have not been.”...

A subscription gets you:

 

The above is an email from Chinen

[JSngry]

Yawn.

Royal may or may not be right. But in no way is he wrong.

Jazz Times has been shit for a few decades now. It may or may not continue to be shit, but at least it promises to be a different odor of shit.

Mind you, I am no fan of shit. But the era of segregated toilets is long past. Let us all shit our shit as we shit it. 

 

Oh yeah, Chinen's beginning at JT coincided, probably coincidentally, with the publication's inexorable decline into worthlessness. He was heralded as a new voice, a new direction in the voice of jazz criticism.

Well, he was. 

[Teasing the Korean]

Today's jazz audience is almost exclusively aging white males, so what's the point?

Great idea, in theory, but about 70 years too late.

And the writer should have written "turn of the millennium" and not "turn of the century," to be more precise.

Edited April 16, 2023 by Teasing the Korean

[Stompin at the Savoy]

9 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Today's jazz audience is almost exclusively aging white males, so what's the point?

 

How do you know that?

[Teasing the Korean]

1 hour ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

How do you know that?

Seriously?

[Ken Dryden]

I let my Jazz Times subscription lapse years ago. One of the last straws was a writer who couldn't tell the difference between Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance" and McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance," neither of which is an obscure composition.

The idiotic rambling memorial piece on Wayne Shorter in the magazine by some editor none of us has ever heard of was pure shit, like it was someone who barely knew how to write about jazz. I won't be subscribing or even visiting their website. It's a safe bet they will alienate many of their current subscribers with the writers they recruit and the magazine will be circling the drain within two years.

 

[danasgoodstuff]

Hmm, we'll see, I guess.

[Rabshakeh]

I thought I had read somewhere that it was not going to have permanent writing staff anymore. Is this just a fig leaf covering that?

[Niko]

This all reads as if they want to transform a magazine read by white grandpas into a magazine that black grandpas read to their grandchildren... With that in mind something like that Wayne Shorter obit makes a lot more sense - those grandchildren will likely not say stuff like "What about his time with Miles and those Blue Note albums?" or "Is it really fair to say Weather Report was Shorter's band?" because they're way too little to worry about stuff like that... Still: poor children + i also wonder whether all this is commercially viable but luckily that's not my problem and i don't know this market segment of black grandpas and possibly grandmas too well either

Edited April 16, 2023 by Niko

[mjazzg]

12 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Today's jazz audience is almost exclusively aging white males, so what's the point?

Not in London. Today's Brick Lane Jazz Festival I predict will be attended by predominantly under 40s reflecting the multi ethnicity of this city. As will be the artists performing

A very good thing, a very vibrant and young scene. Noticeable how often I am the oldest at concerts these days, I'm just in my 60s

This isn't relevant to the Jazz Times debate but I think needs saying to just counterbalance your somewhat sweeping statement TTK.

This board's demographics most definitely do not reflect much of London and other UK city's Jazz audience at the moment. The grey hairs are still out there but not necessarily in the majority 

Now back to Jazz Times...

Edited April 16, 2023 by mjazzg

[mhatta]

In Japan, young jazz (or jazz-influenced music might I say) musicians attract a young audience. Jazz-themed manga and anime movies are also popular (Blue Giant was a hit). In the U.S., when I was in San Jose a few years ago, the audiences at shows by Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Makaya McCraven, and Theo Croker were quite young.  Perhaps jazz fans are polarized. There are those like Glasper and his ilk, whose music is more akin to the old days of Black Contemporary, and those like myself who still listen to Blue Note, "real" Jazz and the like from the 60's.  Yeah, hello us granpas!

Edited April 16, 2023 by mhatta

[Mark Stryker]

13 hours ago, JSngry said:

Yawn.

Royal may or may not be right. But in no way is he wrong.

Jazz Times has been shit for a few decades now. It may or may not continue to be shit, but at least it promises to be a different odor of shit.

Mind you, I am no fan of shit. But the era of segregated toilets is long past. Let us all shit our shit as we shit it. 

 

Oh yeah, Chinen's beginning at JT coincided, probably coincidentally, with the publication's inexorable decline into worthlessness. He was heralded as a new voice, a new direction in the voice of jazz criticism.

Well, he was. 

Leaving aside larger debates, I do not take offense to this wide-angle cannon fire, but I feel compelled to point out at least one important exception to the "Jazz Times has been shit for decades" dismissal that hits rather close to home (smile). 

Edited April 16, 2023 by Mark Stryker

[JSngry]

You're too new to count! 

[sonnymax]

12 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Today's jazz audience is almost exclusively aging white males, so what's the point?

Great idea, in theory, but about 70 years too late...

White guys telling other white guys about (largely) black experience? Isn't that how much of history is written? And you're okay with that? Authentic voices tell a more truthful story. I'm not talking about the skin color of the author. I'm talking about writers who help me understand the cultural and historical value of the music I love. Of course, there are writers like the OP who do an excellent job. But the absence of black and other non-white voices is troubling and in need of change.

Edited April 16, 2023 by sonnymax

[Teasing the Korean]

23 minutes ago, sonnymax said:

White guys telling other white guys about (largely) black experience? Isn't that how much of history is written? And you're okay with that? 

No, and that was my point.

[Stompin at the Savoy]

11 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Seriously?

In other words, you have zero evidence and are guessing.

[Teasing the Korean]

4 hours ago, mjazzg said:

Not in London. Today's Brick Lane Jazz Festival I predict will be attended by predominantly under 40s reflecting the multi ethnicity of this city. As will be the artists performing...

Fair enough.  I was sharing my anecdotal experiences.  I have anecdotally seen significant African American audiences when smooth jazz artists play festivals, but not so much other forms of jazz.  

It seems like this stance is maybe 40 or 50 years too late.  

Just now, Stompin at the Savoy said:

In other words, you have zero evidence and are guessing.

In other words, it is based on anecdotal experience.  I have not conducted a formal academic study.  If you know of any, please share links to the abstracts.

[Stompin at the Savoy]

5 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

 

In other words, it is based on anecdotal experience.  I have not conducted a formal academic study.  If you know of any, please share links to the abstracts.

In other words you have no idea what the actual statistics might be and are blowing smoke.  In this situation anecdotal evidence is no evidence. I don't know either but at least I don't make unsupported claims about it.

[Teasing the Korean]

17 minutes ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

In other words you have no idea what the actual statistics might be and are blowing smoke.  In this situation anecdotal evidence is no evidence. I don't know either but at least I don't make unsupported claims about it.

As I'm sure you are aware, formal academic studies are often undertaken because of anecdotal evidence that has been observed over years or decades.

I think the sales of contemporaneous jazz albums relative to other genres may be one valid statistic to get the conversation going.  I think we can agree that only a tiny percentage of the population cares about jazz in general, and that an even tinier sliver of that that population is buying new jazz albums by contemporary jazz artists.  

The number of consensus jazz standards written over the past 40 or so years, and the number of consensus jazz albums released in during that time may also reinforce this, as would the number of successful crossover jazz artists from the past 40 or so years.

So we are talking about a tiny audience to begin with.  Even if a significant share of that audience is Black, it still represents a tiny share of the overall Black population.

If the quote in the original post were presented to me without a date, I may have assumed it was written in 1963 or 1973, not in 2023.

Edited April 16, 2023 by Teasing the Korean

[Stompin at the Savoy]

2 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

  Even if a significant share of that audience is Black, it still represents a tiny share of the overall Black population.

I agreed with most of what you said until the above.  By the way I like you and think you have interesting things to say.  But I hope you will consider the kinds of unsupported generalizations you are making.  We live in an age of disinformation and misinformation.  Be careful about what you really know and don't know and then you won't add to the mess.

[Teasing the Korean]

1 minute ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

I agreed with most of what you said until the above.  By the way I like you and think you have interesting things to say.  But I hope you will consider the kinds of unsupported generalizations you are making.  We live in an age of disinformation and misinformation.  Be careful about what you really know and don't know and then you won't add to the mess.

Well, I did type the word "anecdotally" several times, so I was attempting to qualify my responses.  I wrote what I did based on my personal experiences, and I have not to date encountered any compelling evidence to make me question them.  

On a related topic, sales of jazz in 2022 inched past those of classical, according to this source.  Classical accounted for 1% of sales, and jazz accounted for 1.1% of sales.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/music-industry-statistics/

[Stompin at the Savoy]

You've had me grinning here at the way you use "anecdotal evidence" as a fig leaf for "personal opinion".😃

[Teasing the Korean]

10 minutes ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

You've had me grinning here at the way you use "anecdotal evidence" as a fig leaf for "personal opinion".😃

Respectfully, it is not an opinion.  It is what I have seen at jazz concerts and jazz festivals over the decades.  That's why it is anecdotal. Others who have attended different shows in different cities may have encountered different demographics.

Edited April 16, 2023 by Teasing the Korean

[Mark Stryker]

A couple of quick points:

1. Though aging white men are certainly part of the mix, the  jazz audience in Detroit is in no way made up predominately of these folks. There is still a HUGE contingent of African Americans across the demographic spectrum who go out to hear jazz in concert halls and clubs. As an example, a couple weeks ago I saw Christian McBride's New Jawn quartet at Orchestra Hall, where my conservative estimate is that the audience of roughly 1,500 people was 70 percent black. I would also note that that the idiom where aging white men make up, by far, the largest share of the jazz audience here is avant-garde/free jazz. I am relying here on anecdotal evidence rather than hard statistics (naturally) but they are based on regular (perhaps weekly) eye-witness accounts dating back to when I moved to Detroit in 1995.

2. The demographics at record stores and the demographics at live performances are different -- I can't quantify them, but I'm just pointing out that when you talk about he jazz audience, you're really talking about multiple audiences for multiple experiences. 

 

 

 

Edited April 16, 2023 by Mark Stryker

[mjzee]

This just sounds like garden-variety racism to me: judging writers by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.  MLK would be appalled.

I also don't know how this policy works out in real life.  Take, for example, Jim Alfredson's upcoming new release "Family Business" (Positone).  Must Jazz Times assign a white reviewer since Jim is white?  Or do they refuse to review the album because Jim is white?  And how does having one African-American (EJ Strickland) and one Latino (Diego Rivera) in the band affect the reviewing status?

One thing's for sure: if Jazz Times ultimately folds, Gregory Charles Royal will blame its demise on racism.