Does the World Need Another Blog?

2010-05-13T06:45:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent events (if that's the right word) motivated me to start this blog. The first one was a few weeks ago I attended a conference on jazz at Leeds College of Music (UK). The principal of the college opened the conference with a brief speech in which he said, in reference to lack of black people in the audience, something along the lines of "well, that proves jazz is not a black music". Er, no, it doesn't, it just shows that white cultural colonisation of jazz has been so pervasive that few black jazzers can be bothered to attend conferences at white music colleges.

The other thing that rubbed me up the wrong way was Stuart Nicholson's opinion piece in JazzWise Magazine's April 2010 edition, in which he basically disses all bloggers as cranks and liers who should be ignored. While it's true that the internet and blogging has allowed anyone and everyone to sidestep the traditional gatekeepers of public discourse, that does not mean that all blogs are rubbish, nor does it mean that there were no cranks and liers among journalists in the traditional media. The internet allows everyone to have their say, it is an incredibly democratic tool, sure, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the 'net, but the same is true for traditional media. Seems to me Nicholson's 'war on blogs' is self-serving, and Ludditic, he doesn't want you to get opinion for free, he wants to charge you for it. Btw, it should be noted that Nicholson, a lover of icy Nordic jazz, is a journalist with opinions on the blackness of jazz not dissimilar to those of the principal of Leeds College of Music. If Stuart Nicholson hates the blogosphere that sounds like a good enough reason to start a blog.

So, here we have what this blog will be about... Rebel Music, freedom music, the struggle against the gatekeepers, against those who man the roadblocks that disrupt the flow of freedom.