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August 2, 2005
Taking Issue
Jim Brown writes about a couple of points with which he takes issue in a recent Rifftides piece, Harmony And History.
First, I take great pleasure in sitting in a Starbucks or other small restaurant and hearing QUALITY music in the background (or even the foreground). It appears that Starbucks did a lot to make this practice widespread, and I applaud it. In fact, many of the restaurants that my wife and I patronize for the food have adopted quality jazz as their background.
A few years ago, I walked into a Panera Bread restaurant to hear a track from Clifford, Sonny, and Max's Joy Spring session, and wondering if they had ever guessed that day what masterpieces they were creating, and that the music might not only outlive them, but also become music for the masses.
And on the topic of late night satellite radio, I have no quibble at all with the high quality show that Bob Parlocha does on a hundred or more stations every night. When this show was in the planning stages, an engineer friend who works for WFMT, the syndicator of the show, asked me for suggestions of who might host it. One of those I mentioned was jazz trumpeter Art Hoyle, a Chicagoan who both loves the music (when I'm out listening to someone good, Art is nearly always there too) and whose great voice has long made him a favorite for voiceover work. He didn't get that gig, but he is "voicing" one of the satellite jazz channels (XM or Sirius). He could have a lot to say about all of the music, but I doubt that he does (I don't have a receiver for those sources).
Like many jazz fans of my generation, I was lucky enough to grow up with GREAT jazz radio, and consider it critical to the good health of the art form. Great jazz radio should be both entertainment and education, and the great jazz jocks could do both very well. And I agree that the currently widespread practice of not talking about the music, failing to identify soloist, sidemen, and arrangers, etc. is doing jazz a great disservice. The great jazz jocks I grew up with were my early teachers -- guys like Dick Martin, Sid McCoy, Hugh McPherson, Daddyo Daylie, Harry Abraham, Bill Artis, and Dick Buckley were some of them. Buckley is still on the air in Chicago. The rest are gone. But I'll put Parlocha in their class. I only wish he was on the air in Chicago.
Jim Brown is a distinguished audio expert who, among his other accomplishments, recorded Carmen McRae at Ratso's, that fine two-CD set released a few years after she died.
Posted by dramsey at August 2, 2005 1:05 AM
Previously, he published 
