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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Other Places: Bruce Lundvall

April 14, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

Ashley Kahn’s profile of Bruce Lundvall in The Wall Street Journal captures the Blue Note label president’s importance as a developer of talent and identifies his partial retirement as a marker of what is happening to the business of recorded music.

To many, Mr. Lundvall’s exit from Blue Note’s day-to-day operations, officially announced earlier this year, symbolizes the forced transition of an entire industry. Rocker-songwriter (Richard) Marx says: “I know Bruce has been veryLundvall and Hancock.jpg frustrated in the changes that have eliminated this thing called ‘artist development.’ The way the industry is heading, it’s really not the kind of thing that Bruce would want to be a big part of anyway.”
Mr. Lundvall’s words express as much: “This is the most challenging time I’ve ever seen in what used to be called the record business, now the digital music business. People download and don’t want hard copies of music. Jazz and classical buyers will probably help keep the physical formats going for a long time, but the idea is to try and monetize the digital world. It’s not easy to make a lot of money in this business anymore.”

Kahn’s article is titled, “Dr. Yes Will Hear You Now.” To find out why and read the whole thing, go here.

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Comments

  1. Ted Lowry says

    April 13, 2010 at 9:58 pm

    In an alternate universe, not so far from our own, you are the head of Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse, or maybe even Atlantic. At least some physicists say things work that way.
    Those would be nice universes.

  2. Michael C. Baughan says

    April 14, 2010 at 5:01 am

    PLus, among all his other talents, Mr. Lundvall hosts a great weekly ‘Blue Note Hour’ radio show on Sirius/XM. If he could only catch his breath while speaking(an apparent impossibility for him as a New Yorker!), it’d be easier to listen to, but hey, ya gotta love the man for all he’s done/doing for jazz!

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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