A GREAT EAR SPEAKS

Editors of magazines and newspapers really, really want writers to say that something is dead. Partly because it’s a dogmatic position that makes people’s blood boil, but partly because they don’t want to think any longer about whatever it is that they’re saying is dead. They want to cross off that box and move on.
Just in terms of volume, there are more jazz musicians and gigs than I can ever hear, and that’s in New York alone. About once every other month — in New York alone — I encounter a young player I’ve never heard of who astonishes me. (Forget about musicians in Cuba and Poland and Italy and Spain whom I may never get to hear.) It’s facile and compulsive, this need to say that an entire art form is dead…
—Ben Ratliff, NYT