Criticism is the stage on which journalists do their fanciest strutting…Music critics have almost no power, writing about a cluster of sounds that have vanished into the air and will never be heard in the same way again.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well.
Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to spend a week with Josh Long and some other very smart people at Patterns, and they encouraged me to share my knowledge and thoughts about Jazz music, the web, and the intersection of the two. For that reason, this new personal site brings these two parts of myself together for the first time.
I’m wary of stepping into the territory of criticism when I talk about Jazz. In On Writing Well, Zissner says that criticism “tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist.” I have been obsessively exploring the Jazz tradition as a listener for almost a decade, but I wouldn’t pretend to have that level of understanding about it. The breadth of this music is tremendous—there’s always more music to explore, which is one of the things I love about it. All I can do is share what I’ve discovered, offering a view of my particular lens.