On JazzWax's birthday each year, I take off, and this year will conform to tradition. Weekend posts will resume next week. This week, I leave you with a tale of how JazzWax began and evolved.
It's hard to believe I started JazzWax 17 years ago. Time flies. Since then, the blog has had 9.3 million page views. The person who suggested I start one—critic and author Terry Teachout—died suddenly in 2022 at age 65, and I think of him often.
Actually, "suggested" isn't the right word. In 2007, we were sitting on my living-room sofa listening to jazz CDs, which we had been doing at each other's apartments in New York since 1996. At the end of the two hours on this particular Saturday morning, he said, "You have to start a blog. You know too much."
Hard to push back against a line like that, but I protested anyway. Terry insisted, I tried to weasel out by saying I was too busy (I was), and Terry pushed back, saying no one was busier than he was and that he was blogging. So I gave in. I promised that within a week from that day, I'd have a blog name, a URL and a first post. Then Terry left.
A week later (August 3, 2007), my first post went up and my life changed. Terry was right, within a month or so, the journalist in me returned and I began interviewing jazz legends for the site. I had worked at The New York Times in college in the late 1970s and after, writing for the paper as if the devil was chasing me. Magazines and newsletters followed. By the early 2000s, I started a marketing company and was consulting with New York finance and real estate companies.
Terry thought that was a waste of my time, and he was right. For the next 17 years, I posted a robust index of interviews. I also committed to keeping JazzWax free to educate readers on jazz and to be an open source for the interviews I conducted. Many of those interviews would be quoted in obits in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times when the interview subjects passed away.
In 2010, Terry was at the apartment and insisted I start writing for The Wall Street Journal. He put me together with his editor—the section's chief arts editor. I pitched ideas, they were approved and I wrote a few successful pieces. Then the terrific and brilliant editor realized what he had and began sending me around the country and to Europe to interview rock and jazz legends for the section's Cultural Conversations column. I would do 60 in all.
I was pitching him ideas so often that within a year he introduced me to the arts editor on the news side. Expanding, I wrote pieces on pop. Then I began writing Anatomy of a Song for the arts section in 2011. Next came House Call (which has lasted 12 years and is ongoing), Playlist for Review (six years) and now the Album@50 column for Arts in Review overseen by the same section editor I started with. We're now on my 37th column.
All the while, I was writing posts for JazzWax and never wavering. In fact, over the course of nearly 6,000 posts, I've only missed one day and that was because the site had a technical meltdown, making posting impossible. I continue to keep JazzWax free as an educational repository.
So Terry, thanks for the JazzWax nudge and for putting me in play at the WSJ, among other things. When I asked Terry a couple of years before his death what motivated him to shove me into new spaces, he said five words: "I knew you were ready." I'm forever grateful.
In tribute to Terry, here's the YouTube video we used to send each other by email as a joke when either one of us complained about the workload and pressure. I'd stop working, enjoy the fish and listen. We both loved Joe Mooney. At the end, I'd put my shoulder to the wheel and push on. I suspect Terry did the same...
And a special thanks to Dan Podkulski, Todd Selbert and E. Michael Wilson for catching the typos, and to Bill Kirchner, for his jazz wisdom, insights and fixes.
