My recent shot across the bow of crit­i­cal ortho­doxy — that one very fine jazz com­poser was less inno­v­a­tive than another in his approach to the for­mal com­po­si­tion of his works — has been opposed hither and yon as hereti­cal, elit­ist, reac­tionary, bes­tial, pre­ten­tious, jeal­ous, frac­tious, mis­an­thropic, mis­aligned, mis­guided, unre­quited, overex­cited, unin­vited, and alto­gether dam­ag­ing to the col­lec­tive morale of jazz crit­ics every­where, who in the main believe that to ven­ture such an inde­pen­dent opin­ion is a sign of intel­lec­tual bug­gery, the likes of which jazz can­not abide if it hopes to sur­vive into the mid­dle years of the 21^st century.

To such crit­i­cal crit­ics of my cri­tiquing I can only say: mine is but a hum­ble jazz blog and I am but a mere free jazz saxophonist-slash-writer, who knows what he likes but doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily like what he knows; who in his quest for cre­ative ful­fill­ment searches for music that sur­prises and delights him; who also hap­pens to be his own favorite musi­cian and can there­fore cre­ate music that he finds excep­tion­ally appeal­ing, even if no one else does; and who derives much sat­is­fac­tion from play­ing and lis­ten­ing to music that places a pre­mium on unmedi­ated spon­tane­ity and emo­tional expression.

I wish to remind those greatly offended by my opin­ions that they are hardly a dan­ger to any­one, given that I am per­pet­u­ally in the minor­ity and vir­tu­ally bereft of influ­ence. More­over, I do not wish to impose my views on any­one, nor do I pre­tend that they are in any way defin­i­tive or supe­rior to any one else’s. They are merely my own.

Fur­ther­more, if I occa­sion­ally express skep­ti­cism regard­ing the integrity of cer­tain insti­tu­tions, keep in mind that they are but peb­bles flung in the direc­tion of an impreg­nable fortress. Surely such a struc­ture is of suf­fi­cient strength and majesty to with­stand my fee­ble attacks.