• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, March 6, 2007

Given his genetic raw material, my nephew will almost certainly be taller (by age seven) and smarter (by Thursday) than I am. I'm not yet prepared, however, for him to overtake me in matters of class and culture. And so it took me by surprise the other day when the li'l flipper, double-diapered and tightly bound into his car seat, coolly requested some jazz during the ride to dinner.

I like this kid a whole bunch, and want to make sure we have conversational common ground long after I've imparted to him everything I know in my primary areas of expertise (those would be baseball and sock puppetry). Thus I gotta get hip to the jazz thing, and fast. My fail-safe solution, as always: O nimble-witted magazine stand, wisen me with your perfect-bound tidings.

By all indications, JazzTimes should not have been the title I grabbed. Its March issue doesn't extend an olive branch to newbies, nor does it offer much in the way of visual flash. That said, it reads as well as any arts or entertainment publication out there. Skillful writers, ranging from civil-liberties gadfly Nat Hentoff to jazz critic of record Gary Giddins, abound in its pages. You might not know much about what they're saying, but you'll be transfixed by the way they say it.

Giddins' "Cadenza" (in which he likens an underground comic artist to Thomas Pynchon) and Hentoff's "Final Chorus" (a twitchy appreciation of the Jimmy Heath Big Band) may be the headline acts, but there's plenty else on the bill. Even if they've been poached from an already-aired PBS documentary, the photos of Duke Ellington pianist and "Take the A Train" composer Billy Strayhorn gorgeously evoke the spirit of jazz's heyday. The decidedly non-fanboy reviews go so far as to take Kenny G seriously, even if a smirky description of the album artwork presents an image -- "Kenny's crotch in close-up repose" -- that makes me rue the day our forefathers went to the mat for freedom of expression.

Gearheads get a nice little shout-out, courtesy of the technical "Sound Advice" column on the remastering of newly discovered vintage recordings. The mag also adds personality in the form of a listening session with harmonica guy and "accomplished professional whistler" (sez Wikipedia) Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor "Toots" Thielemans. You gotta love the jazzman nicknames; I wonder if there's some first-chair London Philharmonic cellist who answers to "C-Dawg" or "Strings."

Most of my concerns are of the nitpicky variety. The piece on dad of ten/drummer Winard Harper dwells too much on his family and too little on his sidebar comments about being black and Muslim in the wake of 9/11, but I should've expected as much from a piece titled "@Home." While a few of the musicians eulogized in the "Personal Farewells" piece died over a year ago, the essays are so warm and cerebral as to negate the tardiness. As for the 24-point "Concert Review from JazzTimes.com" and "News from JazzTimes.com" headlines, they distract more than they enlighten. It's chivalrous to alert readers that the content has been repurposed from the Web, but not at the expense of a big honkin' headline.

Meanwhile, let me once again betray my utter lack of sophistication about the publishing business by wondering why advertisers wouldn't pay more attention to a title like JazzTimes. Jazz records, jazz concerts, jazz instruments, jazz cruises... pretty much everything outside the state of Utah that has anything to do with jazz, in fact, is hawked on the pages of the March issue. I realize this has more to do with the mag's puny reach than with its quality, but you'd think that well-heeled jazz fans buy more than their share of higher-end audio/video equipment, cars, etc.

Not my nephew, though, who fritters away most of his disposable income on Cheerios. Like most people with borderline-embarrassing taste in music, I believe I have fantastic taste in music. JazzTimes makes me want to get a whole lot smarter and, indeed, open my ears to something other than "Utopia Parkway" and the occasional Q-tip.

MAG STATS
Published by: JazzTimes, Inc.
Frequency: 10 issues per year
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