Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival – Troyk-estra and Talk I

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 May

Work in progress… - beware of a bumpy landing !

I have just read a review of Troyka’s debut album in 2009, which maybe I can import into this blog – it appears on the BBC web-site, and was written by Martin Longley.


If I can, I hope to draw on it to make some comments about the panel discussion (plus Q&A) that took place under the title ‘Music journalism in the 21st century’. It comprised four male contributors, amongst them the jazz critic of The Times (broadcaster Alyn Shipton (@AlynShipton), who also chaired the session), The Financial Times*, and the deputy editor of Jazzwise.

The fourth (who had written for The Birmingham Post) was the only one prominently introduced as blogging (and, yet, who talked fairly little about his blog, other than the freedom that it gave him to write about what he wanted, when not earning a living) :

All wanted to peddle a message of ‘If it was good enough for me…’ and ‘I had to work my way up’, littered with boasts of their writing and editorial skills and like kudos. In a way, of course, the typical defensive speech of those occupying posts that they don’t intend – wish, maybe ? – to vacate : Don’t bother to climb the greasy pole – if you do, I’m the resident bear at the top, so mind your neck !

Therefore predictable, and predictable that they would ‘take a pop at’ those whose blog postings extend beyond, as the case might be, the 375-, 500- or 1,000-word limits to which they have to work, or whose content (they believe = opinion ?) is not a review, but opinion.


It’s as if they (wildly ?) assume that the bloggers couldn’t do what they do – and write a 500-word review to deadline – to save their lives, just because the bloggers choose to do something else, for whatever reason – and, if people read what bloggers right instead, who is to say that they are wrong (except that it might endanger further the position of those paid to pen tight, tidy, and possibly tired traditional accounts of gigs or releases).

So much for the chaff. The grains were the usual ‘tips of the trade’ of Someone I’d once met said… or They asked me if I’d stand in when X was sick, and I’m still there 300 years later, the positive face of the negative slant previously given :

They approached me because they knew me, they only knew me because I do this sort of thing, and I only survive doing this sort of thing because I’m brilliant, which they wisely recognized.


I laugh, but it’s just like Hollywood stars (whether in their own eyes or not) who tell an audience :

I met Tom Hanks two years before, and then we were out of contact, but he rang me out of the blue when I’d just finished in The Cherry Orchard off Broadway and said he wanted me for the part of Scrooge

[Hanks did not happen to mention that he had not got Mel Gibson or Hugh Grant to take the part, or that Hanks’ agent had suggested approaching The Star because (if it genuinely was Hanks’ ‘shout’), at least, of industry-driven Factors a, b and c - more likely, The Star knew all of this, and this is the agreed concoction for the PR world that is ‘celebrity’ interview…]


Continued… (not in this posting, maybe in order not to offend the critics’ tender sensibilities !)



End-notes

* Or was it The Sunday Times ? (I didn’t take notes, and I forget which.)


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