Bob Lef­setz by Diaa abdelmoneim

You think you got it bad, jazz musi­cians? Bone weary and dis­cour­aged from search­ing for gigs and record deals, hop­ing to find one that pays more than a hand­ful of magic beans? Count your lucky stars. At least our dreams are small, our fight over rel­a­tive crumbs. Try being a main­stream pop musi­cian, who, unlike us, might once have had a legit­i­mate hope of get­ting rich from his or her music. Lately those peo­ple are froth­ing at the mouth, grop­ing man­i­cally for a new busi­ness par­a­digm to replace the old one — some­thing that will turn their archaic dreams of super-pop-stardom into some­thing more than a piti­ful, naïve delusion.

“The biggest cri­sis fac­ing the music busi­ness isn’t pric­ing, of either music or con­certs,” writes indus­try blog­ger Robert Lef­setz, “but the lack of a fil­ter telling peo­ple what to lis­ten to.” (Par­don me while I throw up in my mouth just a lit­tle bit.) His point seems to be that the death of musi­cal author­i­tar­i­an­ism has resulted in too much free­dom of choice. There’s no one left to tell lis­ten­ers just who’s most deserv­ing of the lion’s share of their music-consuming dol­lar. As a con­se­quence, instead of a few marginally-talented hacks get­ting rich, lis­ten­ers are stuck spend­ing what lit­tle money they’re will­ing to spend on a dis­per­sion of acts, mean­ing that trag­i­cally few rock stars are able to make enough to off­set the rit­ual trash­ings of hotel rooms that they’d once con­sid­ered their God-given right.

Of course, in jazz, the few most hand­somely rec­om­pensed artists are likely find­ing them­selves sub­ject to a sim­i­lar down­siz­ing of expec­ta­tions, if on a pro­por­tion­ally smaller scale. It fol­lows that up-and-coming jazz beauxs are find­ing their dreams of one day hav­ing their own per­sonal shop­per meta­mor­phose into the cold real­ity of cloth­ing them­selves off the racks at Wal Mart and Old Navy.

But we should take heart. The pop stars had so much far­ther to fall. We should pity them, really we should. After all, as jazz musi­cians, we are, as Lef­setz says,  “the obscure per­son who makes a liv­ing play­ing music most peo­ple don’t give a s*** about.” In con­trast to those pop stars, we are but side­walk pate on the shoes of Simon Cow­ell. We should mourn their lost birthright, and curse the fact that now, even in the land of pop music, tastes are less often defined by a few bald­ing middle-aged men impos­ing their vision of wampum-fueled mediocrity.

Thomas Jef­fer­son, Pro­gres­sive: Winner

In 1776 they were the Tories, those who sided with the Crown dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion — men (and yes, they were all men, at least the only ones with any say) who pre­ferred to be gov­erned from afar by a monied few whose pri­mary goal was to pro­tect their self-interest against encroach­ment by the lower classes seek­ing the full exer­cise of their rights as human beings.

Jef­fer­son Davis, Con­ser­v­a­tive: Loser

In 1860 they were the seces­sion­ists, another group led by a rich elite,  ded­i­cated to the per­pet­u­a­tion of slav­ery, and will­ing to split the coun­try down the mid­dle to pro­tect the sta­tus quo by deny­ing free­dom to Amer­i­cans of African descent.

In 1941 they were the iso­la­tion­ists, and they fought against Amer­i­can involve­ment in World War II, in no small part because, after all, the entire to-do was mostly a Jew­ish con­spir­acy, anyway.

Franklin Roo­sevelt, Pro­gres­sive: Winner

In 1948 they were the Dix­iecrats, a group of South­ern politi­cians who so reviled the pro­gres­sive social poli­cies of the Repub­li­can Thomas Dewey and the civil rights poli­cies of Harry Tru­man that they nom­i­nated their own racist can­di­date for the pres­i­dency — Strom Thur­mond — whose cam­paign was run on the propo­si­tion that black Amer­i­cans were less than fully human.

Strom Thur­mond, Con­ser­v­a­tive: Loser

A decade later, the Dix­iecrats were long gone; Thur­mond and his like were more gen­er­ally known as seg­re­ga­tion­ists, and they crossed polit­i­cal par­ties, united by their intent to defeat the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and all sub­se­quent leg­is­la­tion ded­i­cated to pro­mot­ing equal rights for all Americans.

In 1980 they were the Rea­gan­ites, and they got the ball rolling on the rad­i­cal dereg­u­la­tion of Amer­i­can busi­ness and bank­ing — leg­is­la­tion that not only resulted in an enor­mous and unprece­dented trans­fer of cumu­la­tive wealth from the middle-class to the super-rich, but also the denoue­ment: the Great Reces­sion, through which we now suffer.

These groups were the con­ser­v­a­tives of their age. If they’d had their way, we’d be British sub­jects. Or we’d have stayed out of WWII, and National Social­ism might well have tri­umphed, lead­ing to such fur­ther cat­a­stro­phes that we can barely conceive.

Mar­tin Luther King, Pro­gres­sive: Winner

Black peo­ple would still be slaves, counted by law as 3/5s of  a human being. The efforts of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King and Mal­colm X and Rev. Aber­nathy and Con­gress­man Lewis and so many other civil right lead­ers would have come to naught, and we’d still be liv­ing in a legally seg­re­gated society.

There are myr­iad other social issues (women’s rights, child labor, sys­temic unem­ploy­ment, to name just a few) whose cor­rec­tives were opposed by con­ser­v­a­tives. If they’d had their way, women would not be allowed to vote and 12 year-olds would be work­ing 60-hour weeks. The con­ser­v­a­tive solu­tions to these prob­lems – which was to deny or jus­tify their exis­tence – would’ve resulted in greater mis­ery for untold num­bers of peo­ple. You’d be hard-pressed to find an issue the con­ser­v­a­tives won which led to greater ben­e­fit to the major­ity of Americans.

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any impor­tant issue in which the con­ser­v­a­tive point of view pre­vailed in the long run. Con­ser­v­a­tives repeat­edly seek to hold back the tide of human progress, which has long been a march to ever-greater lib­erty and oppor­tu­nity for all. His­tory tells us that theirs is a los­ing bat­tle, that pro­gres­sivism always wins. The irony, of course, is that the apos­tles of con­ser­vatism ulti­mately ben­e­fit from the progress their philo­soph­i­cal fore­bears fought against. They seize the oppor­tu­ni­ties result­ing from pro­gres­sive poli­cies and use them to make sure that, in the future, no one else gets the same chance they got. Time always takes care of these ene­mies of the com­mon good, but not with­out tak­ing down many inno­cents in the process.

Some day soon a life of a child will be saved thanks to the health care reforms signed into law by Pres­i­dent Obama, and that child will grow up to be an adult who does some­thing great – per­haps dis­cover a cure for Mul­ti­ple Scle­ro­sis or Cere­bral Palsy or can­cer. A child who would’ve died because his folks couldn’t afford health insur­ance will instead live and go on to accom­plish some­thing impor­tant that changes the lives of all peo­ple for the bet­ter, regard­less of their polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. It will hap­pen because a few peo­ple rec­og­nized that the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of human evo­lu­tion is a march toward greater oppor­tu­nity and free­dom. The Lim­baughs and Coul­ters and Bach­manns and Roves will lose, as they always do, because in the end, there is but one truth. You can’t hold back time, and time is on our side.

If I tell you that I bought a new com­puter this week­end, you’ll know imme­di­ately that I’ve spent the last sev­eral days mov­ing my dig­i­tal junk from my ratty, over­crowded old machine to a shiny, spa­cious new one. It’s like mov­ing from a 300 square foot pre-war ten­e­ment apart­ment to a gor­geous two-story house in the coun­try. Unfor­tu­nately, it also involves enough work to make me won­der if its worth the time and effort.

The price wasn’t an issue. For $600, I got a lot more lap­top than I got for three times that price only four years ago. The prob­lem is mov­ing the fur­ni­ture and appli­ances from the old place to the new one. Even with all the extra space, I’m find­ing that some of my stuff won’t fit through the front door.

The crux of the prob­lem was the move from Win­dows XP to Win­dows 7. I real­ized that by skip­ping over Vista I was court­ing dis­as­ter. Pro­gram com­pat­i­bil­ity issues were inevitable. How­ever, even had I known of a spe­cific prob­lem, there was no way I was going to invest in the mis­be­gott­ten Vista; it’s been on my kids’ machine for the last three years, so I’ve seen up-close what a piece of crud it is. Get­ting retro-fitted with XP seemed self-defeating and a need­less expense. Bet­ter I buy a com­puter with Win­dows 7 64-bit and cross my fin­gers that every­thing works.

Most things did. I pur­chased a pro­gram called PCMover for 40 bucks. It made migrat­ing from one to the other a fairly pain­less expe­ri­ence. Most of the pro­grams I use reg­u­larly made the move grace­fully. Able­ton Live, AudioMulch, Adobe Audi­tion, Finale Print­Mu­sic, and Sam­ple­Tank all crossed over with­out a hitch. In fact, the only pro­grams to give me trou­ble were prod­ucts of two com­pa­nies you’d hope would be above such petty fail­ures: Microsoft and Digidesign.

PCMover could not install my old copy of Microsoft  Office 2003 over the trial ver­sion of Office 2007 pre-installed on my new HP lap­top. That wouldn’t be a prob­lem if I had my orig­i­nal Office 2003 instal­la­tion disc, but I can’t find it, and any­way, I’ve dis­cov­ered the joys of the free­bie OpenOf­fice suite, so I’m loathe to throw more good time after bad. If my Office discs turn up, great. Until then, OpenOf­fice looks to fill the bill.

The Digidesign issues are dif­fer­ent. I sup­pose I should’ve checked my Pro Tools LE for poten­tial com­pat­i­bil­ity prob­lems, but I fig­ured a com­pany as big as Digidesign would be on top of things. Win­dows 7 has been on the mar­ket for months. Surely Digidesign would’ve updated its soft­ware by now. Heh-heh. Guess again.

It’s bad enough that Digi has only come up with a balky beta ver­sion of its Pro Tools dri­vers for Win­dows 7 (I’ve wres­tled with it for two days, to no good end). Worse than that, how­ever, is that the company’s M-Audio com­po­nent has yet to update the dri­vers for their MIDI inter­faces. Nei­ther my M-Audio Uno nor my Midis­port 1x1 works with my new machine; the com­pany hasn’t even pro­duced beta ver­sions of the dri­vers to work with Win­dows 7 64-bit. As a con­se­quence, I had to pur­chase a new Cake­walk UM-1G — a redun­dant piece of equip­ment that nev­er­the­less has the advan­tage of work­ing with the new OS — essen­tially adding an extra $50 bucks added to the price of the com­puter. Between spend­ing hours try­ing to get my Pro Tools to install and being forced to buy a new MIDI inter­face, I’m tempted to never have any­thing to do with Digidesign again.

On the bright side, Able­ton Live and AudioMulch seem to work great on 7, both of which I use more often than Pro Tools. Adobe Audi­tion con­tin­ues to be the old reli­able of my audio editing/recording pro­grams, and OpenOf­fice seems to do every­thing Office does at least as well. Still, I’d like to be able to enjoy the new place, and that means get­ting all my stuff up and in work­ing order. Until I can do that, it just won’t seem like home.

Yes­ter­day, I was, by some wild coin­ci­dence, pointed in the direc­tion of two sax-playing heroes of my youth. Pianist Lewis Porter e-mailed me links to sev­eral YouTube videos fea­tur­ing him in a quar­tet with Dave Lieb­man, and G-Man Pro­duc­tions sent me a pre-release copy of Grover Live!, a record­ing by the late Grover Wash­ing­ton, Jr. in a 1997 con­cert with his band in Peek­skill, New York. No two jazz sax­o­phon­ists could be less alike in terms of style, yet the music of both had a big impact on my life and devel­op­ment as a sax­o­phon­ist. Each grabbed my mind and soul in slightly inverse pro­por­tion. Both have a hold on my heart, as I’m reminded by these vids and the CD.

My dad was a jazz musi­cian, so there were always jazz LPs around my house as a kid, but Grover’s late ‘70s album Live at the Bijou was one of the first two jazz albums I bought myself (I pur­chased Buddy Rich’s A Dif­fer­ent Drum­mer on the same day). Bijou remains one of my favorite albums, in no small part because it was one of the first, but also because it’s a seri­ously cook­ing exam­ple of ‘70s jazz funk played by a mas­ter of the form. Grover is often cited as the god­fa­ther of Smooth jazz, and cer­tainly he did his part in spawn­ing that hea­then idiom. At his best, how­ever, Grover was any­thing but smooth. Indeed, in con­trast to the glib pleas­antries that would later char­ac­ter­ize that ster­ile genre, Washington’s ‘70s play­ing was as hot, pas­sion­ate, and emo­tion­ally authen­tic as any­thing in jazz at the time. He might have embraced slick pro­duc­tion val­ues, but he never lost the sense of soul­ful, spon­ta­neous cre­ativ­ity that ele­vated his play­ing above the often mun­dane stu­dio backing.

Grover Live! cap­tures the sax­o­phon­ist near the end of his career, and while the music not quite as hot as Bijou’s, the music nev­er­the­less is fur­ther proof (not that any is needed) that Wash­ing­ton wasn’t a pan­derer, that he played funk because that was who he was, and that he did it with more fire and inven­tion than any ten lesser jazz musi­cians, regard­less of styl­is­tic per­sua­sion. Washington’s back­ing musi­cians are an accom­plished lot, com­pris­ing key­boardists Adam Holz­man and Don­ald Robin­son, bassist Ger­ald Veasley, per­cus­sion­ist Pablo Batista, drum­mer Steven Wolf, and gui­tarist Richard Lee (the lone holdover from Washington’s Bijou days). The band plays hot and loose. Like the best small group jazz, there’s lots of room to stretch. Roles are strictly assigned but freely inhab­ited, and while there’s the occa­sional lapse in aes­thetic judg­ment, the musi­cians sup­port and com­ple­ment each other well.

The group’s reper­toire draws on many of Washington’s best-known vehi­cles, from “Inner City Blues” from his first CTI album, to “Just the Two of Us” and the title track from his mega-hit Wine­light—also a lot of tunes I don’t rec­og­nize, since I essen­tially stopped lis­ten­ing to him after 1981 or so. Grover plays with the same emo­tional inten­sity and seat-of-the-pants inven­tion he always did, with great reserves of energy. It’s true that, out­side of the saxophonist’s per­sonal style of impro­vis­ing (which is 100% his own), there’s lit­tle else here that’s stun­ningly orig­i­nal. But there’s also no cal­cu­la­tion in this music, no slav­ish adher­ence to for­mula. The music is direct, hon­est, and unaf­fected. It’s those qual­i­ties that carry the day.

Dave Lieb­man circa 1975 by Tom Marcello

Those qual­i­ties have always defined Dave Liebman’s music, as well. My inter­est in his music post-dated my youth­ful infat­u­a­tion with Washington’s. Still, I came to it fairly soon, as a col­lege stu­dent in the early ‘80s. An older musi­cian friend of mine who had briefly stud­ied with Lieb­man at a sum­mer jazz camp turned me on to the sax­o­phon­ist, loan­ing me a copy of his 1975 A&M Hori­zon album, Sweet Hands, which I’m not sure I ever returned (I have a vinyl copy, but I think I bought it myself at Sounds in the Vil­lage circa 1987 … the memory’s going, I’m afraid). From there I checked out his Look­out Farm album on ECM, which I dug, but the Lieb­man album that really turned me on was Pen­du­lum on the Artists House label.

Recorded live at the Vil­lage Van­guard in 1978 and released a year later, Pen­du­lum fea­tured his most fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor from that era, pianist Richie Beirach, with trum­peter Randy Brecker, bassist Frank Tusa, and drum­mer Al Fos­ter. By the time I’d dis­cov­ered the album, I’d adopted Coltrane’s Live at Bird­land as my all-time favorite jazz album. Pen­du­lum attempted and occa­sion­ally cap­tured the same sort of tran­scen­dence, and if Dave Lieb­man was no Coltrane, he was Dave Lieb­man, and that was plenty. I remem­ber read­ing reviews of Lieb­man at the time that more-or-less labeled him lit­tle more than a Coltrane idol­a­tor, some­thing I didn’t get then, and still don’t. While he was inspired by Trane and learned from his exam­ple, Lieb­man was too spon­ta­neous and intense an impro­viser to be con­sid­ered a mimic. In fact, given the hordes of bla­tant jazz copy­cats that would fol­low in the years to come, any lit­eral debt Lieb­man owed Coltrane seems com­par­a­tively slight, in retrospect.

The videos sent me by Lewis Porter fea­ture Lieb­man with Lewis on piano, Joris Teepe on bass, and Rudy Roys­ton on drums, in a con­cert on the Rutgers-Newark cam­pus (where Porter is a pro­fes­sor). The band per­forms four tunes — “Maiden Voy­age,” “Mr. P.C.,” “Poin­ciana,” and an excerpt from “Body and Soul.” Recorded casu­ally in what looks like a class­room, the per­for­mance doesn’t quite emit the heat of a night­club set, but the musi­cian­ship is nev­er­the­less very high. Porter (who I should note was kind enough to read my book man­u­script and pro­vide some direc­tion, re: Get­ting It Pub­lished) plays artic­u­late, inspired post-bop piano, while Teepe and Roys­ton pro­vide a brac­ing, churn­ing rhyth­mic under­car­riage. It’s a fine band on all lev­els. As a long­time Lieb­man admirer, how­ever, my atten­tion is most drawn to him.

Per­haps what is most remark­able (and for a middle-aged sax­o­phon­ist like myself, most inspir­ing) about Lieb­man is the con­stant growth he’s exhib­ited through­out his career. He’s always been an utterly focused soloist who is never less than com­pletely involved in the task at hand. That sense of com­mit­ment has never changed. What has changed — actu­ally, evolved is a bet­ter word — is his abil­ity to play the sax­o­phone. Whereas he was a mon­ster 30, 20, or ten years ago, he’s even bet­ter today. I see on these videos a sax­o­phon­ist who’s mas­tered his instru­ments so com­pletely, it’s almost fright­en­ing. There are many tremen­dous jazz sax­o­phon­ists alive today, but only two come close to scar­ing me away from play­ing the horn: Wayne Shorter (who’s exhib­ited a sim­i­lar life-long capac­ity for growth as a sax­o­phon­ist) and Lieb­man. This Rut­gers con­cert is just one of untold thou­sands Lieb­man has per­formed over the decades, yet these one-off videos could well stand as a cul­mi­na­tion of his life’s work, in as much as Lieb­man played on that day every­thing he’d learned and expe­ri­enced up to that point. I’ve heard him play bet­ter, in the sense of being inspired by his cir­cum­stances and sur­round­ings. But as the most recent exam­ple of his work, I’ve never heard him play more. As always, he brought every­thing to the table, and pro­vided an up-to-date account­ing of his non-stop devel­op­ment as a jazz saxophonist.

Prob­a­bly only in my twisted mind is there a thread con­nect­ing two such dif­fer­ent sax­o­phon­ists as Grover Wash­ing­ton, Jr. and Dave Lieb­man. Yet there’s some­thing com­mon to the play­ing of both that exem­pli­fies the best of jazz, and if it can’t be alto­gether quan­ti­fied … well, nei­ther can swing, but we know it exists, right?

[The Liebman/Porter videos can be viewed on Lewis’s YouTube Chan­nel.]

The NY Times runs a piece today about expen­sive pri­vate trade schools lur­ing stu­dents into tak­ing out exor­bi­tant stu­dent loans they will prob­a­bly never be able to repay. The prob­lem has ram­i­fi­ca­tions beyond the per­sonal into the soci­etal – when those loans go into default, the tax­payer ends up foot­ing the bill. The schools are also ben­e­fi­cia­ries of fed­er­ally financed stu­dent aid – Pell Grants, in par­tic­u­lar – mean­ing they’re tak­ing a dou­ble dip of  tax­payer money.

What’s inter­est­ing to me is that these schools teach what you might sup­pose to be “prac­ti­cal” skills: cook­ing, com­put­ers, health care, and such. Like the pri­vate jazz schools I wrote about a cou­ple weeks back, these insti­tu­tions can charge in the neigh­bor­hood of $30K per year in tuition. If a per­son can’t expect to pay off that kind of debt work­ing as a chef or an IT guy or a nurse, what chance does he have as a jazz musician?

The more I learn, the more I appre­ci­ate my inex­pen­sive state uni­ver­sity music education.

These days, open­ing new CDs sent to me for review almost makes my heart hurt. The mar­ket for com­pact disks is small and get­ting smaller, and it seems like the same can be said of the mar­ket for recorded jazz. Regard­less of the music’s qual­ity (and much of it is very good), every new disc I hear is like a cry from an aban­doned child.

That feel­ing was espe­cially pro­nounced the other day as I opened a box of beau­ti­fully pack­aged CDs from Auand, an Ital­ian jazz label that’s been around for nearly a decade, but which I only recently dis­cov­ered. In a time when most music pack­ag­ing con­sists of lit­tle more than a down­loaded jpeg, Auand’s art­ful black & white pho­tog­ra­phy and ele­gant cover design stub­bornly denies the pass­ing of an era — just as its music rep­re­sents the vital­ity of con­tem­po­rary acoustic jazz, even as it bucks the for­mi­da­ble odds stacked against it. Over the next few days I’ll talk a bit about the releases Auand exec­u­tive pro­ducer Marco Valente was kind enough to send my way. Up first is Eco Fato by Quili­brì, a quin­tet led by the Ital­ian soprano sax­o­phon­ist Andrea Ayassot.

Quilibrì‘s unusual lineup fea­tures Ayas­sot, gui­tarist Karsten Lipp, acoustic bassist Ste­fano Risso, and per­cus­sion­ists Adri­ano De Micco and Luca Spena. The band plays a self-contained yet emo­tion­ally expres­sive fusion of jazz and var­i­ous world musics. A use­ful if inex­act par­al­lel to Quilibrì‘s sound is the work of the group Ore­gon. Lipp’s finger-picked acoustic gui­tar estab­lishes the sort of pas­toral har­monic back­drop that Ralph Towner’s once did with the Amer­i­can band. Like Ore­gon (and its pre­cur­sor, the Paul Win­ter Con­sort) Quili­brì sur­veys a vari­ety of musi­cal dialects, from fla­menco to samba to North African idioms (if I had to do it again I’d’ve been an eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist; as it is, I’m stuck to describe the music as accu­rately as it deserves).

Though the rhythm sec­tion plays with great feel­ing and skill, the group’s guid­ing light is Ayas­sot, com­poser of the nine tunes and chief soloist. Ayas­sot plays with a dry, lightly inflected tone, mostly free of vibrato. His lines are spar­ingly yet pre­cisely artic­u­lated, melodic and rhyth­mic in the man­ner of Stan Getz. Indeed, the project seems a bit like a 21^st cen­tury updat­ing of Getz’s work with Joao Gilberto and Char­lie Byrd from the early 1960s, albeit with a much greater empha­sis on con­tra­pun­tal inter­ac­tiv­ity. Ayas­sot and Lipp related closely to one another in the course of their impro­vi­sa­tions, as do Risso and the per­cus­sion­ists. In gen­eral, the pas­sions are sub­tle — they smol­der rather than burn — but the music is no less affect­ing for it.

Next up: sax­o­phon­ist Emanuele Cisi’s The Age of Numbers.

Writer Phil Free­man has seen the light, and it shines on the world of self-publishing. His lat­est project is Burn­ing Ambu­lance #1, the first install­ment of Freeman’s new “quar­terly jour­nal of the arts.” Besides Phil him­self, con­trib­u­tors include Kurt Gottschalk, Stephen Haynes, Matt Cibula, and Phil Nugent. The Win­ter 2010 issue includes pieces on Bill Dixon, Henry Thread­g­ill, and Ortho­dox. Matthew Shipp is on the cover.

Phil has posted an extended ver­sion of his Shipp piece on the Burn­ing Ambu­lance blog. It’s a great read, in no small part because Phil makes the con­scious deci­sion to ignore the rhetor­i­cal bombs Matt is inclined to throw and instead con­cen­trate on the music and the phi­los­o­phy behind it.

[Phil thinks Matt’s rips of Jar­rett, Han­cock, and the like turn-off poten­tial lis­ten­ers. I get his point yet dis­agree. The per­ceived audac­ity of Matt’s state­ments might just as well inspire curios­ity: “Who the hell does this guy think he is?,” leads to “I won­der what this guy sounds like?” Of course, both views are purely speculative.]

The arti­cle delves into the pianist’s descrip­tions of his time with David Ware, his attrac­tion to the music of Anton Webern, and the record­ing of his lat­est solo album, 4D, among other things. There’s more meat to this arti­cle than any ten I’ve seen writ­ten about Shipp.

Phil sent me a link to this about a week ago. For what­ever rea­son, I didn’t get to it. This morn­ing, how­ever, as I received yet another hand­ful of “jazz doesn’t sell, we can’t help you” responses from pub­lish­ers and agents regard­ing my own book, I remem­bered Burn­ing Ambu­lance and gave it a read. The no-nonsense qual­ity of the piece reminds me that the DYI ethos can lead to arts writ­ing with­out com­pro­mise, and that’s a very good thing. It may or may not be the future of jazz pub­lish­ing, but it sure as heck is the present.

[Burn­ing Ambu­lance #1 can be pur­chased here.]

So Rab Hines, noto­ri­ous cyber­stalker, is caught, or at least iden­ti­fied. Good news for trum­peter Bruno Leicht, whose life the pseu­do­ny­mous Hines has made mis­er­able. The stalker’s real last name seems to be Leicht, too, sug­gest­ing that there might me some famil­ial con­nec­tion. Let’s hope Bruno can put this behind him … after, of course, pur­su­ing legal action against his tormenter.

The inter­net is cool, but it sure has made it easy for us to be uncivil to one other. And anonymity isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a req­ui­site. By it’s nature, the shel­tered dis­tance of the net allows (even seems to encour­age) us to say things to a per­son that we’d never say to his face. Even those with the best of inten­tions can inad­ver­tently fal­ter. In the short form of the blog, espe­cially, sub­tlety and nuance is lost. Offense is taken eas­ily. Ret­ri­bu­tion can be brutal.

I’m not sure what I can do to make it bet­ter. One thing: I’ve decided to stop respond­ing to insult­ing things said about me on other sites. I notice that as hurt­ful or annoy­ing or ridicu­lous I might find some­thing aimed at me, respond­ing or rebut­ting almost always begins a chain of events which ends up mak­ing me feel worse.

Another thing: Just as I wouldn’t allow some­one to remain long in my house if they were rude to me, I won’t tol­er­ate per­son­ally insult­ing lan­guage on my blog. Rea­soned dis­course is great. I’m all for it. But if some­one wants to trash me, they’ll have to do it else­where. I’m not going to host my own flogging.

Of course, the vast major­ity of com­ments here have been civil, funny, smart, and insight­ful. Only a tiny frac­tion have been obnox­ious. I hate to hijack the blog to address that small num­ber, but I want to get my stand on the record.