Yes, All About Jazz does look pretty slick and mainstream, and perhaps that wasn't as good an example as the Vermont and L.A. examples I had in mind (the names of which I can't remember), but hey, you're a lot closer to Dez and Keith than they know... I sort of feel like any attempt at DIY publishing comes from the same impulse as zines, no matter how slick the results may look. I mean, your own live tour CD 'Get in the Minivan' looks perfectly professional in comparison to demo-tape days, even though you did it all by yourself. And the cover continues to make me laugh out loud. Genuinely successful fringe zines usually move closer to the center, the way Signal to Noise has done in appearance if not so much content. Remember that Option began as a crappy looking newsprint thing, as was Jazz Times. But the punk ethic, well, that's something entirely different, and I think it lives on in webzines more than anywhere else. Steve Smith ssmith36@sprynet.com -----Original Message----- From: skip Heller [mailto:velaires@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 7:10 PM To: Steve Smith; perfect-sound@furious.com Cc: zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com Subject: Re: Critics (was: Re: Freak In) on 3/18/03 2:10 PM, Steve Smith at ssmith36@sprynet.com wrote:
There are actually quite a large number of grassroots jazz tabloids, from New York's All About Jazz to similar efforts from Vermont to Los Angeles. Those strike me as being far closer to zine culture than to mainstream press.
That's funny -- the look very mainstream to me, and their content is very mainstream to me. This month the cover (at least of the Philly edition) is me and Greg Osby, neither of whom is exactly Dez Cadena or Keith Morris.
But I also remember buying a Xeroxed Bay Area improv zine called Something Else about eight years ago... it even came with an exclusive cassette of folks like Crispell and Gino Robair. I think it's more widespread than we know, but perhaps it's not as prevalent in jazz as in rock.
The kids want to work for the rock music they're goin' for so much these days...
All I know is that when I was fresh out of college and back in Houston, I wanted to start such a zine myself, but lacked the manhours in which to do it. Story of my life.
you & me both, pal -- skip h http://www.skipheller.com