John Mayer is on the mend and will be announcing this week his Born & Raised Tour 2013 plans. John Mayer, his technical management team are collaborating with Billboard.Biz to hosting a Google+ Hangout with invited fans on Thursday March 21st.
I teach technology priding myself incorporating the latest software engineering advancements when I use the InterWeb. My compliments to the John Mayer team and Billboard for structuring an intelligent qualification survey form for this event. A direct benefit of the invitation to this event with John Mayer and Don Was is that it will sharpen your Google+ Profile for precision and accuracy.
John Mayer is on the comeback trail. He’s endured and overcome painful lessons of late, some of which were self-inflicted, others were due to his health. I’m pleased to report that John Mayer is resuming his live performances with a renewed sense of vigor.
My first sign that John Mayer was back was his appearance segment on the CBS Sunday Morning February 10th broadcast. That insightful segment piqued my interest in what John Mayer is doing next.
I hope I qualify to be invited to the John Mayer Google+ Hangout this could be historic.
If you like knowing what goes into the making of album art and graphics design watch this John Mayer YouTube video about Born and Raised.
Scott Yanow is a prolific American jazz historian and journalist. He is known for his many contributions to the Allmusic Website (See Scott’s Biography and Desert Island selections). He has written ten books on jazz and produced extensive library of jazz recording reviews for over 30 years. He has also created over 600 liner notes for various record labels.
His CD reviews are found at LA Scene a monthly West Coast jazz paper.
I have looked high and low for a music journalist whose last name begins with X. I could not find anyone.
David Byrne speaking at the 2006 Future of Music Policy Summit hosted by the McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So I decided to take this opportunity and go back through the alphabet of music journalists that I didn’t get to write about first time. I had some tough choices to make for the Music Journalism A-Z series when I decided I would only feature one music journalist by first letter of their last name.
There are many other music journalists that deserve major recognition for their accomplishments and invaluable insights.
The first music journalist I want to mention is David Byrne. Most people freely associate him as a musician, songwriter, or as a visual artist. He writes a regular journal that I subscribe to, David Byrne’s Journal. David Byrne is a technology leader who assuaged our collective consciousness. He articulates a much-needed voice of expression for artistic intelligentsia. He has authored nine books to date.
True Stories (1986)
Strange Ritual, Chronicle Books (1995)
Your Action World (1999)
The New Sins (Los Nuevos Pecados) (2001)
David Byrne Asks You: What Is It? Smart Art Press (2002)
Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information with DVD (2003)
The letter C proved challenging as there were two other music journalists of renown I wanted to write about, Robert Christgau and Nate Chinen.
Christgau is the cornerstone of music criticism and his Consumer Guide has helped me purchase fantastic recordings over the decades.
Nate Chinen constantly turns me on to new jazz sources via his blog and music reviews in the New York Times.
English: on the “Music in the ’00s” panel, 2010 Pop Conference, EMPSFM, Seattle, Washington. (Photo credit: Joe Mabel)
The next music journalist I wanted to circle back to is David Fricke, Senior Editor at Rolling Stone. He authors the “Fricke’s Picks” column in the Rolling Stone record review section.
He is responsible for the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time special edition issue and column that gets a lot of views on my music blog post as a two-part series that I wrote about last year.
The letter G had several music journalists I could have also written about and that have my undying respect. Those journalists include Gary Giddins, Mikal Gilmore, Ralph J. Gleason and Peter Guralnick. I had just written about Peter Guralnick in January so I faded on him for this month.
Gary Giddins has been a long-time columnist for the Village Voice and unarguably the world’s preeminent jazz critic who has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Journalists Association. He’s also received the Raiph J. Gleason Music Book Award.
Mikal Gilmore is a friend on Facebook. I enjoy his posts and love the articles he writes for Rolling Stone Magazine. He has two interviews with Bob Dylan that are must reads in the latest Rolling Stone Special Issue.
Ralph J. Gleason had a powerful influence on me as a music author of depth and substance. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and was co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival. He represented both pop and jazz music with equal intensity. I especially love his liner notes for the pivotal jazz recording Bitches Brew by Miles Davis.
I debated for too long about featuring Nat Hentoff for the letter H. I struggled to do him justice in my draft blog post. I thoroughly enjoy his music sociopolitical bent. He is a jazz subject matter authority and my kinda liberal 😉
Richard Meltzer wrote one of my all time favorite rock music epics, The Aesthetics of Rock. I’m on my second copy now 😉
It was a total toss of the coin between Robert Palmer and Jon Pareles of the New York Times. I can’t get enough of Mr. Pareles writing. I’m drawn to his prose like a moth to a flame.
I still feel like I could write about 25 more music journalists in this post. What a great well of knowledge to draw upon.
Paul Williams is the Father of Rock Criticism. He created the first magazine of pop music criticism and rock culture, Crawdaddy!, when he was a seventeen year-old college student. I loved reading that magazine growing up.
Mostly self-penned in the beginning, and then a vehicle for such incandescent writers as Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer, and Jon Landau, Crawdaddy!chronicled rock’s growing self-awareness and communicative power, helping to coalesce a nascent progressive underground which would irrevocably change the music, and provide a template for any aspiring writer. I should know. Finding issue #7 at a “head shop” on St. Mark’s Place in the winter of 1966 was a life-changing experience, showing me a new way to understand the music I loved, and how I might repay the favor through my own words.
In 1995, Paul Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident, leading to early onset of dementia, and a steady decline to the point where he now requires full-time care.
The burden on his immediate family has been immense.
You can find out more about how Paul is doing by reading his wife Cindy Lee’s blog, Beloved Stranger, about her life with a brain injured spouse.
Then, if you can, please visit the donation page they have set up, and contribute.
I love to cultivate new music influences. One benefit in blogging this series is to learn more about music journalists I have not experienced yet like Aidin Vaziri.
Aidin Vaziri is a Pop Music Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was featured in the book “Best Music Writing 2009,” that was edited by Greil Marcus.
Click on the buttons to read his blog and past SF Chronicle articles.
Many of the music journalist’s I have covered have written for the New York Times so it’s refreshing to read the West Coast perspective. San Francisco is such a vibrant music city. Aidin writes about music with conviction and honesty. He’s a straight shooter.
Aidin is adept at interviewing many famous musicians passing through San Francisco. Since turnabout is fair play he was interviewed by The Bold Italic an online San Francisco Magazine. Click on his picture below to read how he parries and thrusts with the questions for a change 😉
You can keep up with Aidin Vaziri via Twitter here
Jaan Uhelszki is an American music journalist and co-founder of the music magazineCREEM. Like Gloria Stavers and Lillian Roxon whom I have featured in this series she is one of the first women to work in rock journalism.
In 1976 she left CREEM and moved to Los Angeles to work for Record World magazine. She would go on to become founding news editor of online magazine Addicted to Noise before heading up Microsoft Music Central’s news department.
She holds the unique distinction in being “the only journalist to have ever performed in full makeup with Kiss”?
Uhelszki has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone Online. She presently works as Relix’s editor-at-large. Jaan is also a regular contributor to my favorite UK music magazines Uncut and Classic Rock. She has also contributed articles to The Morton Report.
Uhelszki writes liner notes for Sony Legacy Recordings, Rhino Records, and Time-Life. She has written essays for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees The Pretenders, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Patti Smith, and The Stooges. Jaan Uhelszki regularly appears as a music authority on VH1’s “Behind the Music” series, as well as on radio shows and at industry panels and workshops, where she works as a media trainer.
Specializing in training musicians, actors, and executives how to master the interview and avoid the pitfalls. Part therapy, part self-empowerment, part charm school all designed to enhance your verbal and non-verbal communication skills and make you a more compelling you. One-on-one sessions all individually tailored for your particular needs. You would be shocked to know who I’ve trained.
Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America’s last real literary outlaw.
Nick Tosches is an American journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet. Tosches began his writing with poetry and rock-‘n’-roll magazines. He wrote for CREEM, Fusion, and Rolling Stone. Like many of the music journalists featured in this series he started on very common publication grounds.
Books
Nick Tosches first book was released in 1977 under the title Country: The Biggest Music in America. The book is arranged like a fan’s scrapbook, leaping across time and subject
Nick Tosches’s next book, Hellfire a biography about Jerry Lee Lewis considered by many his music book masterpiece.
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The number one greatest music book ever ‘Observer’
Quite simply the best rock and roll biography ever written ‘Rolling Stone’
My first recollection of reading a music journalist with any regularity was Gloria Stavers, editor in chief of 16 Magazine. Stavers was credited with being one of the first women rock and roll journalists. Her vibrant personality carried across as both a fan and a knowledgeable source of information.
I find it ironic that I also had a teeny bopper phase that helped to formulate my experience with music. It is the reason I curb my tongue when it comes to Justin Bieber. I had a paper route in those days as a Norwalk Hour news carrier. I would strap a transistor radio to the handle bars and listen to the WMCA Good Guys or the WABC All American disk jockeys on AM radio out of New York City. I always made it a point to buy the latest monthly issue of 16 Magazine at Espositos Variety in South Norwalk where I picked up my papers to deliver. I would devour that magazine cover to cover. 16 Magazine was one of the best informed sources about the British Invasion. I had that paper route two years from 1964 through 1966. So I had plenty of pocket-money to buy 16 Magazine plus lots of comic books 😉
Tony Barrow, the Press Officer to The Beatles, credits Stavers with providing “significant help” towards the task of fast-tracking the band to the top of the US charts. In the months before their first visit to the US, a real volume of the editorial space in 16 was given over to The Beatles. Paul McCartney remembered Gloria as being “very dignified, professional and totally business-like. She inspired respect from us all”.
Tributes
I urge you to visit the Gloria Stavers Tribute Blog created by Karen Steele. You’ll find great pictures of Gloria Stavers like this one there along with other invaluable writings and memorabilia.
Looking past the doldrums of Winter 2013 to a better Spring and Record Store Day 2013 which this year will be Saturday April 20th.
I think it’s just the best that Jack White is voted Record Store Day Ambassador 2013. He always supports this event and I have purchased several of his exclusive Record Store Day collectibles the past few Record Store Days.
Jack you are the man! Here is what Jack White has to say officially about Record Store Day…
Years ago someone told me that 1,200 high school kids were given a survey. A question was posed to them: Have you ever been to a stand-alone record shop? The number of kids that answered “yes” was… zero.
Zero? How could that be possible? Then I got realistic and thought to myself, “Can you blame them?” How can record shops (or any shop for that matter) compete with Netflix, TiVo, video games that take months to complete, cable, texting, the Internet, etc. etc? Getting out of your chair at home to experience something in the real world has started to become a rare occurrence, and to a lot of people, an unnecessary one. Why go to a bookstore and get a real book? You can just download it. Why talk to other human beings, discuss different authors, writing styles and influences? Just click your mouse. Well here’s what they’ll someday learn if they have a soul; there’s no romance in a mouse click. There’s no beauty in sitting for hours playing video games (anyone proud of that stop reading now and post your opinion in the nearest forum). The screen of an iPhone is convenient, but it’s no comparison to a 70mm showing of a film in a gorgeous theater. The Internet is two-dimensional…helpful and entertaining, but no replacement for face-to-face interaction with a human being. But we all know all of that, right? Well, do we? Maybe we know all that, but so what?
Let’s wake each other up.
The world hasn’t stopped moving. Out there, people are still talking to each other face-to-face, exchanging ideas and turning each other on. Art houses are showing films, people are drinking coffee and telling tall tales, women and men are confusing each other and record stores are selling discs full of soul that you haven’t felt yet. So why do we choose to hide in our caves and settle for replication? We know better. We should at least. We need to re-educate ourselves about human interaction and the difference between downloading a track on a computer and talking to other people in person and getting turned onto music that you can hold in your hands and share with others. The size, shape, smell, texture and sound of a vinyl record; how do you explain to that teenager who doesn’t know that it’s a more beautiful musical experience than a mouse click? You get up off your ass, you grab them by the arm and you take them there. You put the record in their hands. You make them drop the needle on the platter. Then they’ll know.
Let’s wake each other up.
As Record Store Day Ambassador of 2013 I’m proud to help in any way I can to invigorate whoever will listen with the idea that there is beauty and romance in the act of visiting a record shop and getting turned on to something new that could change the way they look at the world, other people, art, and ultimately, themselves.
There are several music journalists considered the “dean” of music critics. The music journalist community looked favorably upon Robert Palmer in that leadership role.
There was a period of my life where I voraciously read the New York Times along with Rolling Stone Magazine. It was during that time I became captivated by the knowledge imparted by Robert Palmer.
Robert Palmer had an incredible knack in adding jet fuel to my interests. I read his writings with a desired relish that made me very learned in the process. I believe this had to do with his transferable music interpretive skills.
In the early 1970s, Palmer became a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. He became the first full-time rock writer for The New York Times a few years later in 1976, serving as chief pop music critic at the newspaper from 1981 to 1988.
The book he wrote Deep Bluesis a standout publication in the study of the blues. Robert Palmer had a rich analytic side strongly complemented by an ability to synthesize information into discernible form. His definitive style compels the reader to immerse themselves in the delta and south side blues experiences.
Deep Blues became a living documentary. This is perhaps the best blues documentary.It was filmed in the Northern Mississippi hill country, where Fred McDowell is the figurehead of local tradition.
Musician
Robert Palmer was a practitioner of music, which set him apart from many music journalists who wrote about music but lacked that intricate detail of performing it with scope and precision. He and fellow musicians Nancy Jeffries, Bill Barth, and Luke Faust formed a psychedelic music group blending jazz, folk, and blues with rock and roll, called The Insect Trust. The band recorded its first, self-titled album on Capitol Records in 1968. He played alto sax and clarinet.
Tributes
Robert Palmer’s daughter Augusta from the first of his four wives put together a film of discovery and connection with her estranged father entitled, The Hand of Fatima.
Scott Yanow
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There are several music journalists considered the “dean” of music critics. The music journalist community looked favorably upon Robert Palmer in that leadership role.
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