The Jazz Internet, Part 1: Josh Jackson

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This is the first installment in a series of interviews with jazz critics and bloggers on the topic of the internet as a medium for jazz writing.

Josh Jackson, of WBGO, is a bit of an anomaly in this series. He doesn't write about jazz, he broadcasts it, and his view of the internet as a medium for jazz is therefore very different from the rest of my interviewees. But it's an interesting view, and an essential one. The transition from radio to the internet is complex, and many of its facets translate into the wider internet transition of the jazz community. Read on:

JW: Josh, your work for WBGO (including Live At The Village Vanguard with NPR and The Checkout) obviously relies on the internet a good deal, for streaming audio, etc. A good place to start this interview off might be just for me to ask for your own perception of how the internet has shaped your work in jazz, both in terms of how and what you can produce.

JJ: I should probably start by saying that I'm a broadcaster.  That might sound like an outmoded term when you put it next to my official WBGO title (Special Projects Producer), but it's a bigger concern.  My job is finding, maintaining, and building an audience.  The package I deliver is jazz. The short answer is that the internet has allowed me to deliver more packages to more people - cover more music for a new audience outside of a radio station's traditional reach.

Beyond that, I can also create a deeper level of engagement online.  Radio has certain inherent limitations.  Content feeds an FM transmitter with an FCC-defined footprint.  People hear it or they don't.  You can only expect so much with that system.  However, in the online space, you can add a photo gallery, embed a chat function, even stream video.  There's more to discover and more ways to engage.  People feel like they can participate in some way.  There's now a reliable access point for people who live outside of metro New York to tap into a significant amount of talent and a valuable part of our artistic culture.

One of my favorite Coltrane records is One Down, One Up: Live At The Half Note, which is a recorded radio broadcast from the now-defunct Half Note club in New York. It's just one of many examples of radio broadcasts from the 1950s and 1960s which are available now on CD. As you say, having a concert like that available to hear more or less permanently online, as opposed to only once on the radio, has obvious advantages. 

But would you say there are any disadvantages to streaming and recording, say, Bill McHenry at the Vanguard in 2011 as opposed to hearing Coltrane on the radio in 1965?

Quiet as it's kept, you can thank radio for a lot of great jazz recordings.  The new Miles Quintet '67 "bootleg" series?  All European radio recordings. Same with the Coltrane quartet's 1962 tour.  Mingus at Antibes.  Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall was Voice of America, as were most of the Newport Jazz Festival recordings (Ellington in 1956, anyone?).  I could go on for a while.  And there's still a treasure trove of material that's never seen the light of day.

I would love to see the audience measurements of the original Coltrane broadcast.  It probably wouldn't be a big number, and nobody outside of New York heard it as it happened.  We often look at this history with rose-colored glasses.  Historically, however, I do believe the importance of this material does increase in value over time.  The internet moves too quickly for us to care as much as we should, but someone may come along in fifty years, take stock of all this output and say, "I'm glad WBGO captured Bill McHenry from the Village Vanguard.  This is what his music sounded like on a November night in 2011."  The same could be said for the 48 other concerts we've recorded at the club for this series.

The major disadvantage to this is that there is not a viable mechanism in place to monetize content for those people who are creating it: first and foremost, the artists who make this music and secondarily the talented people who capture it with care.  Paywalls simply do not work for the economic scale of jazz, and it runs contrary to the aim of public media. In a sense, having so much almost devalues it because content is ubiquitous. The music business used to make money by managing scarcity (whether or not artists benefited from that management is another story). That no longer exists.  Yet we haven't learned how to manage abundance very well either.  It is regrettable that the tool we use to communicate lulls some people to believe this is all free.  We place no merit on the work of others because so much is available for so little.

I don't mean to sound bleak, because I have faith that something good will come out of this process. I'm simply saying the consumers have a major advantage over the producers in this scenario. Everyone is a producer now. That doesn't mean everyone produces something of substance or quality. It just means there's more noise to cut through. I can find hundreds of thousands of medium to poor quality productions on YouTube, but they're also competing for people's time the same way ours are. And most musicians never see a dime from that stuff. Promotion is great, but at some point the landlord will ask for the rent.

That's all very true. And I think what you're doing is cutting through, because it does have such high production values. But there is one thing you mentioned that stands out - the Vanguard broadcastsare free, and the Vanguard itself definitely isn't. I live in Maine, and can't make a Bill McHenry show except on special occasions, so the broadcasts are a godsend for me. But what if I lived in NYC? What if I lived just outside the city? I can see a college student who would have saved up for a ticket to the Vanguard now sitting in front of his computer watching the video stream of Joe Lovano, or Renee Rosnes, or whoever. I guess what I'm getting at is (and I risk asking a leading question here), do you think a certain demographic - the young, more or less penniless jazz lover - might be choosing the broadcast over the actual experience?

I've never really entertained this notion.  People have written to me from all parts of the world to say how thankful they are to be able to access the programming from the Village Vanguard.  Judging from the feedback I've received from the club, there are people who hear and see our broadcasts and still come to the Vanguard.  Let's be mindful that the Village Vanguard was a a destination long before either of us came into this world.

If I knew that someone in New York chose the broadcast over being in the club, then they I'd say they are really missing the point of live music experience.  No matter how hard I try to present a faithful and accurate representation of what happens on a particular night, I can only get you so far.  If you are not in the space, then you are removed from the totality of it.  The computer or phone will never give you the complete sensory stimuli.  You can't touch the walls or get a draft of perfume from that girl on a date at the next table.  Live music performance creates a customized social interaction of being in a space with other humans at a moment in time. I cannot bottle that.

And that's the end of that! Okay, so - we've covered the ways you can take advantage of the internet to produce your work, and the ways that work now differs from the way it would be on radio. You are in a position to view the online jazz community both as an insider and, if not an outsider, than at least a more removed observer than I am. What about the rest of the jazz community - blogs, webzines, etc.? How has the internet affected the world of jazz criticism, writing and reporting in general? (This doesn't have to be - shouldn't be - a quick answer!). 

 

I can tell you that as few as three years ago, jazz on the internet was a useless landscape, to steal a phrase from Jobim.  That has changed.  What does this mean?  Well, for starters, it translates into more voices.  That's a good thing.  Blogrolls are getting longer.  Artists are more actively telling their own story without media filtration, and they are cultivating an audience for their work.  New writers and observers - many with perspectives that rarely emerge from institutional media - now have platforms and channels to distribute their unsolicited opinions.  This inevitably leads to a certain erosion to the status of criticism.  If you disagree with someone's opinion, you can state your case freely.  More and more, the view from nowhere is under siege.  I don't know if that's good or bad.  It just is.

I will say, however, that the standard of decorum has also diminished.  The internet provides enough separation between people to intensify the best and worst of us all.  The rate of transfer gets faster and faster.  Brushfires spread quickly and engulf a potentially helpful dialogue in flames.  Snark rules.  Misinterpretation abounds.  Can you really state a case in 140 characters on Twitter?  Sure. Can you elucidate certain points much better in essay form?  Absolutely.  Does the internet afford people the opportunity to understand the difference?  Yes, but that's up to the individual to make the assessment.  The responsibility to make sure you are putting your best effort forward rests squarely on anyone who chooses to engage with the medium - whether you are a maker or a taker.

The jazz community is still dealing with many of the same issues for decades; hell, maybe since the beginning of the term "jazz."  We're just airing the laundry in a new place.  The curmudgeon in me just wants to tell everyone to engage in more platter and less chatter, but the beauty of all this is having the choice.

I agree with both of those points, especially the point about that erosion of "criticism" as a pedestal profession. I'll be good and won't press you on the goodness or badness of it! 

But I do have a related question. Do we need the conventional "jazz critic," the Nat Hentoff or the Martin Williams or Leonard Feather, anymore? The most conventional critic publication in the U.S., Downbeat, doesn't produce much in the way of lasting insight these days. JazzTimes has Chinen, so... But Ratliff and Chinen at the New York Times aren't quite "jazz critics" either. Nate Chinen recently reviewed a Sting concert in the Times, something to which Martin Williams certainly never would have, as I'm sure he would have put it,  "stooped." So would you say that model of the jazz critic still relevant in any way?

Martin Williams might have characterized Nate Chinen's reviewing Sting as "stooping," but I could never take that position.  Thinking like a purist is too antithetical to my own experience. Large media companies have versatile journalists. There's an arts desk, assignment editors, copy editors, digital/multimedia and let's not forget management - all layers of staff that have some varying degree of skin in the game.  There's nothing inherently wrong with writing about different kinds of music.  Arguments for purity drive me nuts.  People out there that are open to different styles of music tend to impress me more.

Criticism is still imperative, because the role of interpretation is fundamental to a society.  All this surplus of media and information, though, is rapidly changing the role of criticism.  The economy for assessment has lost a lot of ground to the exponential rise of expression.  The question for me is - how do critics ultimately respond to that?  I don't know.  I just wish I read more great writers framing jazz in ways that the music cannot position itself.  I like context, and I want to know how this music is connected to both the present and history of ideas.  Challenge readers to think about jazz in ways that connect to other disciplines.  Get off the lonely island!

Comments

[Bob Porter]

Great interview!