Reacting to Tuesday’s posting about the Wingspread conference on ways to grow the market share of jazz, Rifftides Reader Jan Brukman thinks it unlikely that jazz will exceed its three percent share of the market (an optimistic estimate) for music recordings, but he doesn’t think it will disappear. As string quartets will never die, neither will jazz, and for the same reasons. They are classical forms; if you stray too much from the classical forms, however, you get experiments, which real … [Read more...]

Gordon Sapsed reports on British radio and clubs not quite keeping jazz at arms' length and not quite embracing it. Here in the UK the London radio station Jazz FM recently changed its name to Smooth FM. Explaining the change the owners said, "it's a sad fact of life that Jazz FM has never made a profit in 15 years of existence .....the station will continue its commitment to broadcast 45 hours of specialist jazz programming each week ..... but there is an enormous appetite for artists such as … [Read more...]

Have I mentioned lately that I wrote a book called Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond? You can buy it from the publisher and get free shipping. Please do. Doug Ramsey explores every facet of Desmond’s public and private lives in this intimate, often hilarious and very thorough biography, a book that is very hard to put down. —Ken Dryden, allaboutJazz.com See the entire review here. … [Read more...]