Them Changes: Talking Jazz Journalism with Howard Mandel

Howard Mandel is an author, educator, journalist, and, since 1993, president of the Jazz Journalists Association. Howard's career crosses more than five decades of music journalism, from his early days writing for the Chicago Daily News to his current work as a contributor to publications worldwide.

As Howard prepares to step down from his role as JJA president at year's end, we found time to explore the story of the birth and evolution of the JJA and to talk through just some of the topics of interest to our community today.

Whether you're a longtime reader of jazz criticism or new to the conversations that shape how we understand this music, Howard's insights offer a window into our organization and the often invisible work of documenting and contextualizing America's most important cultural export.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalists Association, an international professional organization of writers, photographers and broadcasters focused on jazz.

I am Lawrence Peryer, proud JJA member, managing editor of The Buzz and your host today for a discussion with long-serving JJA President, Howard Mandel.

Howard is an author, educator, journalist, and president of the Jazz Journalists Association since 1993. Howard's career crosses more than five decades of music journalism, from his early days writing for the Chicago Daily News to his current work as a contributor to publications worldwide.

As Howard prepares to step down from his role as JJA president at year's end, we found time to explore the story of the birth and evolution of the JJA and to talk through just some of the topics of interest to our community today.

Whether you're a longtime reader of jazz criticism or new to the conversations that shape how we understand this music, Howard's insights offer a window into our organization and the often invisible work of documenting and contextualizing America's most important cultural export.

Lawrence Peryer: I would love to hear a little bit about the origin story of the JJA. I would expect that there are a lot of people curious about that because not everybody has been with the organization the whole time. Specifically, I'd love to hear some anecdotes around the coming together, but I'm really interested in what the founding members were setting out to accomplish. What need did they think they were filling, or what were they seeing?

Howard Mandel: I don't know how much I can remember about that, but let me see. The mid-eighties were a very good time, as we look back now, for music journalism. A lot of newspapers had daily music reviewers, and jazz was part of that mix. The hegemony of pop music had not overtaken coverage to the extent that it does now. Jazz seemed still to be part of the basic cultural mix. And there were a lot of us, and we kept running into each other at festivals and concerts and stuff like that. So we knew each other, and we were often meeting each other, making friends.

By this point I was living in New York. This was 1985. The National Writers Union organized a music writers caucus, and this included a lot of rock and roll writers in New York City. Those writers had different interests and concerns and problems than those of us who were writing about jazz because they had to go through different kinds of business issues to get access to the artists. They had different kinds of expectations about where they could get published, how much they could make, et cetera. It just didn't speak to what jazz journalists were experiencing much.

So we knew that. Willard Jenkins called us together to have meetings to talk about what we could do together—writers, photographers, broadcasters dealing with jazz. I think it was Arts Midwest that was the organization that Willard was running. We got together in meetings here in Chicago. We had a couple of meetings, and they were well attended, and people seemed to want to have some sort of organization, although we weren't very clear on what we could do as an organization. Like maybe we could better organize the bowling that we went to do after concerts. Maybe we could organize the beer blast better. We could have a lunch or something like that. And it took us a couple of years before we organized ourselves to be able to do anything more productive.

And I think the first thing that we really did that was productive was to institute a newsletter, which was in print and mailed out snail mail. It was a very amateurish, though professional, newsletter. We were not incorporated at that point. We didn't incorporate until 2004. So we went almost fifteen years just as a very ad hoc organization. And we realized that if we were going to do more—and we had already started doing more—in 1996, we instituted the jazz awards. In 2001, we started this thing of eighteen activists, advocates, altruists, and abettors of jazz. This became the Jazz Heroes Program.

Arnold J. Smith, who was an accountant by trade and one of the older jazz journalists, urged us to incorporate and organize so that we could have a more formal structure. And we did that in a very loose way, too. The JJA is still operating under interim bylaws. We've never passed the bylaws. So that gives us a lot of flexibility. I wasn't the first president of the JJA—I think I was the third—and I took it over from Art Lang, who's a friend of mine. He'd worked with me at DownBeat. But when I became president, I was in New York. Art had been in Chicago, as he still is, and I thought we should do stuff. And what can we do? We've got this awards program going. We've got the newsletter going.

At that time, it was really the beginning of the popular adoption of the web. I knew somebody who was a web designer. He built a website for us—Jazz House—that gave us the potential to publish everybody's work quickly online. There was no social media at that time, but we strengthened our networking. Using the website, members were writing short postcards about things that they'd heard. We were posting that. They were sequential. They could allow for more comment, expanded discussion. It strengthened our network quite well. If I went to California, I had friends there now who'd tell me where was a good place to eat. We set up book conferences that way. We went out to San Francisco in the early mid-nineties and had book readings.

Anywhere we went, whether it was New York or New Jersey or DC or Philly or Cleveland, there were a group of us, and we could identify ourselves as jazz journalists, and we would talk about the necessary issues. There was some attempt to represent our interest to publishers. DownBeat at one point lost a whole bunch of slides from twenty different photographers. DownBeat would call for photographers to send their slides in to be considered for use in the magazine. And then, presumably, the ones that they rejected would get sent back to the photographers. At one point, an editor put the box that was going back onto a table that got cleared away, and stuff was thrown out.

So we had to try to represent those photographers to DownBeat, which was difficult since a lot of us were still working for DownBeat also, and they didn't want to hear about it. The magazine did not want to deal with this, and we really had limited power because we were not a union, and we are not a union. We cannot—the JJA cannot negotiate prices or wages, for instance. That's prohibited by our 501(c)(3) status. But those kinds of issues—we could go as a group to publishers, talk about what we were doing, represent ourselves elsewhere in the industry. Otherwise, we had no representation. We were a pretty significant sector of the jazz industry, and we were servicing the record companies and providing reviews to the presenters—the concert and club presenters. We felt like we needed to have some leverage that you could obtain by becoming a group.

Lawrence: That period of transition between Art and you was also a period of transition where the organization went from being a social and networking and kind of boosterism-type organization to, like, okay, now media's changing. The world's starting to change, how people access audiences is changing. You had this anecdote you told about DownBeat. What were you thinking when you said, "Sure, I'll be president of JJA for a while"? What were you thinking you wanted to do, or that the organization needed done, when you raised your hand and said, "Okay, I'll take a shot"?

Howard: I don't know what I was thinking.

Lawrence: Thirty-two years later.

Howard: I was thinking I could do it. Gene Santoro was also being discussed. He was part of the mix, and he said at one point, "Do you want to have a club, or do you want to have an organization?" This is before I was chosen, and I thought, "We want to have an organization." It seemed to me like part of the discussion was, "Oh, we should have a New York critics circle." I thought, "That's not going to reach out very far, and I'm not interested in sitting around with a dozen of my cronies in New York and having high-minded abstract discussions about jazz."

I had worked at the Chicago Daily News for five years on the city desk. I had not gone to journalism school, but I had taken journalism seriously since high school. I knew the five Ws. I understood pyramid-structured stories, and I thought a lot of my colleagues do not have this training at all. They're just in jazz journalism because they love jazz, but they don't really know how to do this. And I like being bossy and editing and trying to improve people's approaches and suggest to them how they could tighten it up and improve their work. And I thought that was something that we should strive for. We should model excellence in jazz journalism.

And if anybody was going to take jazz journalists seriously, we had to take ourselves seriously, and there were things we could do. One of the things that jazz journalists have done since the 1930s is run polls. You could debate the value of having awards and all this stuff, but it did give the JJA some prominence. DownBeat was having polls, but they weren't going out and presenting their awards to anybody. I thought if we're going to give awards, we should be out there handing something to the award winner. This will also raise the profile of the journalist because the journalist will be the one who's handing the award. Let's do it in public so that the journalist's audience and the musician's audience—they both see the musician and the journalists together. This is going to bond us.

So those were some of the innovations that I pushed. And here's a new way to communicate. Let's save the money of mailing out a newsletter by having a website, and let's explore this website thing. Other people are doing it. It doesn't cost that much or anything. Let's go with it. I like experimenting with media. That's something that I get a kick out of. I think that I brought that to it.

Lawrence: If one of the defining characteristics of jazz over its first and now into its second century has always been this tension between innovation and traditionalism, how did you see that play out among the journalist pool? Because you just gave a simple anecdote: "Oh, we're going to start using email instead of physical mail." How did the manifestation present itself of the traditionalism versus the need to continue to reinvent and innovate?

Howard: I don't think that there was much blowback about our adopting new media formats. We did have a number of older journalists who we admired, who never really joined the JJA or were not very active in it, but they admitted that we were there and it was nice. And we were the younger guys, and that was okay, but they didn't say, "Don't do that." And most of them were very appreciative that we had organized and tried to form a body. They didn't know what we wanted to do, and we weren't sure either, but there was no gainsaying of, "Oh, that's not a good idea. You guys shouldn't organize."

JJ News and JJ Jazz Awards—both of the platforms that we maintain are WordPress—so you could just get them off the shelf. But at that point, you had to build everything from the ground up if you wanted to have a website. We couldn't post articles ourselves on Jazz House, and that was silly. But with WordPress, we could do it ourselves more. And my partner Joanne Kawell initiated that transfer from Jazz House to JJ News and working on WordPress and taking on Google Office as a way to work—and all the ways that we work now. I don't think the membership cared, and I don't think our sponsors cared. And in fact, we were able to get better sponsors and more sponsors because we were evidently media-forward, and they liked that. We could put their logos and their ads on our website, give them signage. And this was helpful in the fundraising that we were trying to do at that point.

Lawrence: There's been so much change, and not all of it has always felt positive. We don't need to articulate a laundry list of changes to journalism over the years, but the media landscape, especially in the last twelve or eighteen months, has seen layoffs, the weird dynamics between big tech and platforms, AI, and whatever that's going to mean. In this sea of uncertainty, how do you think about finding and identifying the paths forward?

Howard: Finding it is like groping in the dark. It's like hands out and see what you can find, run into. But one of the things that I love about jazz and that I really take heart from is that this music survives and thrives regardless of what else is going on in the culture. It has never gotten promoted by all the commercial forces and mainstream. The music survives regardless of what else is going on because people want to make this music. They want to make music this way, and other people want to listen to it, and they respond to it. It resonates with them.

And I think that's true of jazz journalists also. We found ways to communicate. And jazz journalism did not begin with the New York Times hiring a daily critic. It started as basically clubs of listeners trading information about records that they were getting hold of. Marshall Stearns and what he did in New York City, and then correspondence going out, and the book Jazzmen, from the New Orleans profiles, was written in 1938. And Hugues Panassié writing about Louis Armstrong, no matter how wrong he was. The idea was, here's somebody who wants to write this. I don't think that there was a huge, "Oh, we've got to have a Louis Armstrong biography this season. Who's going to write that?" It's self-propelling, and we are going to find a way to keep that information flowing. The people who want to talk about jazz are going to keep finding ways to do that.

And so I'm looking for what's possible. And it may be on the fringe of the greater media spectrum. It may not enjoy the financial support. It doesn't. But nonetheless, I really would love it if concert reviews were able to resurface because we're missing a lot of information.

I went to a concert the other night. It was a Miles Davis tribute. It was run by the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, which is Orbert Davis's organization. And they showed a Miles biography movie. Then there was a discussion that they had via Zoom with Mark Ruffin from SiriusXM. And Miles's nephew was a drummer—Vincent. Anyway, the three of them talked about Miles for a while, and it was fun. And then Orbert and his quintet played, and there were 250 people there for a whole day's activity about this. That's cool, and it's interesting and significant. It was in a venue that I'd never been to before and I'd never seen reviewed. And it's a nice venue, and we should know that this kind of activity is possible to put on, that people enjoy it, and there's an audience. And sometimes something actually happens at these concerts that can suggest other ideas or socializations.

I was in Paris over Labor Day to hear Denardo Coleman's presentation of The Shape of Jazz to Come. They had taken the music from Ornette—his father's album, The Shape of Jazz to Come—and six different jazz musicians. And Carmen Moore, a classical composer, orchestrated the music for a 46-member orchestra and improvisers that Denardo played with. They mixed the improvisers and the orchestra together, and the music was outstanding. And I've heard Ornette's attempts to play with symphonies and to integrate symphonies and improvisation. I heard Skies of America when they revived it in the eighties in Fort Worth. And I heard it when Kurt Masur performed Skies of America with Ornette and Prime Time at the New York Philharmonic. And this was a much more integrated and successful and exciting concert. And it really demonstrated to me that there's been advancement in the third stream sort of experiments that Ornette and Gunther Schuller and John Lewis and Jimmy Giuffre and various other people were trying back in the sixties, and that Lennie Tristano tried in the forties.

I reported on that as "This is a great concert. It sounded good." And I went to hear Herbie Hancock over the weekend, last weekend, and it was a great show with Terence Blanchard and Lionel Loueke's sextet. Herbie is 83 or 84. He played his butt off. And people should know—here's a Chicago native son, and he's playing at Symphony Center, which is our most vaunted venue, and there's no review of it.

Lawrence: I feel very similarly, but maybe coming at it from a slightly different point of view, which is because of the ease of access to recorded music now through the streaming services, all I have to do is hear a name and it's easy for me to explore it at a very low risk. It's not like when I was a kid and I had to go scrape together $8.98 to go buy the record and find out I don't like it. But live events are much different. The cost of admission has gone up. I have to get in the car, I have to park, I have to do all the things that a cranky old guy doesn't want to do, and I have to be convinced to get out of the house. And I might not go see some things that are probably really good for me. And to have that type of guidance, to have that role that a good reviewer and a good critic can provide—I think that is even more valuable these days. The real-world experience getting coverage and sort of explication. I love that. The need I think we have for that. I think you've identified your next opportunity.

Howard: My Substack is a vehicle for that. And I think that my blog at ArtsJournal.com, Jazz Beyond Jazz, also—I was doing that. If something happened live, I would write about it if I had the time to turn to it. And I think that's very important also for audience generation because younger people—you and I, we don't need to go out to shows to meet potential dates. That's what a lot of going out to hear music is. It's a social event. And if people don't know that's a viable social event—that, "Oh yeah, there's a crowd of people there who are interested in the same thing you are. You might meet some friends or dates or partners or whatever"—and that can only happen if there's news about it. Otherwise, nobody knows that's an opportunity. They're dependent on the promotion of the venue, which may not reach them.

Lawrence: Tell me about your decision to start a Substack. Was that a reaction to lack of outlet, or you had more to say than anybody was going to publish, or what's the why behind you doing that?

Howard: I wanted to be in that conversation online. I like writing. I like it more the more I do it. I like it more now than I ever did. It's easier for me. And that doesn't mean it's easy, but it's easier. And I have things I want to say, and I want them to be seen, and I want them to be seen in the context of other people's arts writing.

When Arts Journal opened up, I saw that as an opportunity, and I thought I would reach people that I'm probably not reaching with my DownBeat articles. Arts Journal was going out every morning to 400,000 viewers in email, and they would headline the day's blog posts. So I thought that was pretty good promotion for me. "Okay, that's where all the cool kids are, and I want to be a cool kid. So I'll go there, too."

I am not interested these days in trying to build my subscriber base for economic gain because I don't want to be enslaved to my Substack. If I'm charging money for my Substack, I feel like I have to be producing something on a fairly regular basis for that readership because they're paying for it. And I'd rather just write something and put it up. And if somebody wants to read it, fine, and I'll keep it free for now. And then I don't feel beholden. "Oh, I've got to get an article out." I'd rather approach it as, "Hey, if you have something I want to write today, and here it is, I can do it."

Lawrence: You mentioned the topic of writing for free. I would imagine from one point of view it has to do with career and life stage, but also maybe more deeply, is it an opinion that everybody should just do what's right for themselves? I'd love to hear some thought on that.

Howard: I don't think writers should contribute to publications for free. I think if you're going to self-publish, you can do it for free, but if you're writing for somebody else, you ought to get paid. And I urge that, and I think that circumstances are such that that's difficult to enforce, but that is definitely the ideal.

I don't know if I could have had a career coming up today. Back when I came up, there were things I tried to do. Like I tried to have ten paying gigs a month. Didn't always meet it, but I needed the money. And even if it was $20, that would count as a paying gig, and I felt like I was working, and I would work for it and look for places to do that.

Another strategy I used to try to employ was to have a local outlet, a national outlet, an international outlet, and sometimes I could leverage the same article I wrote locally for somebody internationally or something like that. I tried to find various commercial ways to survive, which I needed to do. And now I don't need to do it as badly. It's not that I'm rich or inherited a lot of money, but we own our house, and I'm on social security, and I make a little money on the side by writing, and I want to keep writing.

Sometimes you have to write for free to get your initial clips. To me today, it's important to be in the conversation, and I'm trying—since we can do the Substack thing and you're being read on the same platform as The Nation and Ethan Iverson and Ted Panken and whoever you think your favorite music journalists are. They're almost all there. And okay, I'll write for free there.

Lawrence: How did you reconcile that with the Arts Journal comment? Do you view access to a large enough audience as a form of compensation?

Howard: It's a form of communication and outreach. I don't know if I consider it compensation, but again, I consider it being in the conversation. Other people are going to be there. Am I going to have my statements there? Are my statements countervailing in some way? No, I don't have to be there at all. Does that answer that?

Lawrence: I think the way I hear it all is that, much like the music you like and some of the views you've talked about of how jazz endures, it's okay to have principles, but you also—you live in a real world where you're just navigating a sort of stormy sea.

Howard: You have to be practical about it. I have friends who disdain writing for JJ News because we're not going to pay, and I understand that. I wish we could pay for pieces. We don't have the money. If we had the money, then maybe we could institute a payment for that. It would be a different publication, professionalize that. The same way you could do that for The Buzz, but it's just not practical.

Lawrence: What have you learned writ large from your love of jazz and the edges of art? And what have you learned from jazz journalists?

Howard: Writ large, what I've learned from jazz is that it is wide open, and there is no sense in trying to conform to convention in the arts. It just doesn't really—that's not a guarantee of anything. And you're going to make a much more personal and impactful statement if you figure out what you want to do, what you've got to say, and you stand behind that and you go for it and you're taking chances. But that's what art is. You can throw away the manifestations that don't work, but when it works, you've got something that's new and your own, and you can identify with and you can stand behind and maybe build on. I take that from all the arts, I think, and that's a core belief of mine.

Jazz journalists have taught me how much people want to communicate about this art form and that it is vital to them to be part of that community and to have something to say, and that they do drill down to be honest and genuine in their responses. I know very few, if any, jazz journalists who lie about what they like or profess admiration for something that they really disdain. I've gotten into fights with people about that, too. But they're in general an honest breed that wants to do this work. It's not, "Oh, the riches are so fantastic. I'm going to go become a jazz journalist. Like I could be a dentist or a jazz journalist." No, you can't be a dentist or a jazz journalist. Maybe you could be both. But it's not likely that you're going to go into this profession thinking that you're going to do anything except hear a lot of music and be responsible for responding to it.

And I've learned that there's a lot of variety among jazz journalists—variety of tastes, of abilities, focus, approaches. Not everybody is as excited about the fringes as I am. But we're spread all over the world, and that's been exciting to learn, too. I've made good friends with people in Russia, Mexico City, Gambia, Canada of course, France, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, through the JJA. We've connected those people. Berlin, Tokyo—and they're everywhere. There may not be a lot of them, but they are really interesting people who have a lot of the same beliefs I do in the power and value of this art form.