So I went and did some work on my favorite releases of 2014 page, check it out here. It comes with my rational for my new approach to listing my favorite albums by year, and some thoughts on a few of the albums. And check back to the page periodically, as I'll be expanding the …
Category: Opinion
Brief thoughts on the Sonny Rollins/New Yorker/Django Gold Kerfuffle
My S.O. said I couldn't limit my thoughts on last week's Django Gold's satirical piece in the New Yorker about Sonny Rollins to five short sentences. I'm about to prove her wrong. In no particular order: If you thought it was funny (I laughed at the Miles bit), cool; if not, also fine. The response …
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What Ted Gioia Missed, and Absolutely Nailed
You might have read Ted Gioia's recent piece on The Daily Beast entitled "Music Criticism Has Degenerated into Lifestyle Reporting." Gioia laments the current state of music criticism, arguing that it rarely includes analytical discussions of the music in the way that football commentators often include details of how a particular play or strategy works …
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OutsideInsideOut’s Top 10 of 2013
In Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard notes how humans like to stockpile their past as a way to remember it. Perhaps one of the finest examples of this are the various year end poll, best of lists, recaps, summaries etc. This year NPR Music hosted the annual jazz critics poll that Francis Davis has been …
Voting for Debut of the Year is Gonna Be Tough
Well shoot, it's that time of the year again - time for me to start going through the numerous albums from 2013 I listened to and try to figure out how to rank them, an arduous task to be sure. As a voter in the annual Rhapsody.com critics poll, I will have to figure out …
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Words Don’t Go There: When “Tight” Just Won’t Do It
So you've probably heard the adage: "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." That gets to what follows, but I was reading something for my dissertation a couple weeks back (I can't remember the author, perhaps it was Nathaniel Mackey) and the phrase "words don't go there" really stuck out. What the author was …
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Outside Inside Out’s Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2012
Well, it's Top 10 List time again. And while it's impossible to hear all of the several hundred jazz albums that come out each year, it's still a fun and challenging enterprise to make a best of list. So what follows is a list of what I considered to be the top 10 albums that …
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A Great Conversation on the “Is Jazz Dead?” Theme
If you've been going through the jazz blogosphere recently you've likely to have come across another iteration on the "Is Jazz Dead?" debate. In this case it has stemmed from reactions to Ted Gioia's new book, The Jazz Standards. A professor of mine, William Harris, posted a link on facebook to Benjamin Schwarz' response to …
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Why “Best of” Lists are Inherently Not Great
So looking over my Top 50 Saxophone players list I saw what some would consider an egregious omission: Pharoah Sanders. He wasn't on my list, although he deserves to be. But I think the 50 people who are on my list deserve to be there too. So there we go, not that it needs emphasizing, …
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Another “best of” list – this time saxophonists
There's just about nothing that uber nerdy jazz fans like to do is make lists of their favorite players and albums. And I've found a new one that I think is pretty interesting. The good folks at the Burning Ambulance blog recently put together their top 50 greatest saxophonists of all time. While their list …
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