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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Preamble To Reviews

March 15, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

A copy of every jazz album released does not show up at my house. It only seems that way when I look at, maneuver around or trip over stacks of CDs. The stream of review copies arriving by mail, UPS, FedEx and DHL makes it possible for a music writer to keep up with the work of established artists, learn what new ones are up to and hope for revelations, surprises, discoveries. That’s the theory.
The realilty is that listening to music is a linear pursuit. Until there’s a way to inhale or inject it (no jokes, please), the amount of music one human being can absorb is limited to the number of hours in the day minus time for distractions such as eating, sleeping, making a living, staying fit and maintaining agreeable relations with family and friends. There are people who expand their listening hours by employing iPods to pour music into their skulls every waking hour. I have no intention of being one of them. I have heard of a teenager who goes the next step. He retires with ear buds in place, his iPod supplying him through the night with music as he allegedly sleeps. We can only imagine the eventual effect of this practice on his development.
But, I digress. The point is that the accumulation of albums presents an opportunity and a burden. The opportunity is to evaluate a representative sample of what is happening in the music. The burden is one of guilt that stems from the inescapable fact that it is impossible to hear every CD that record companies and individual musicians send in the hope that it will be favorably assessed. The necessity to pick and choose is unavoidable.
Over the next several postings, I will offer observations on some of the recent CDs I have rescued from the stacks, dogged by the certainty that I will overlook something important.

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Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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All About Jazz
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Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
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Brubeck Institute
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be.jazz
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Jazz History Online
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Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
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Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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