Reviewing The Sets At A Jazz Festival
I took on the role of reviewing each of the bands during the three days of the festival. This is not a job to be taken lightly, though. Musicians are notoriously suspicious of critics, especially when (like me) they don’t play themselves and haven’t a clue what it’s like to create music. Even once you’ve taken the decision to publish and be damned, there are decisions to be made about what to write about and how to write it.I am not a professional critic, nor am I a particularly skilled writer. Working as a university academic means that most of my writing is for obscure journals where scholarly rigor is more important than wit and flair. As a member of the team that developed justlikejazz.org I tried to take our overall objective – to put the experience of the festival online – and focus it on capturing something of the music that we all heard in the hall.
I haven’t tried to promote the festival, or individual bands. I have written what I thought, and what struck me as I listened. I wrote the review while the concert was in full-swing (excuse the pun). I hope the individual reviews are not uncritical. I actually loved everything I listened to, and my tastes in jazz are broad and somewhat eclectic. In my academic work I have often studied jazz musicians and the music business in which they work, and the imperative there is to be as empirical as possible; to record what is actually true, not what I think.
These, of course are only my own opinions. I tried to express how the performances struck me, to add relevant details about who made the music, how it progressed and how the audience responded. I also wanted to try and put the single set into a wider context. Sometimes that means saying something of the musicians’ careers, other times locating the performances we enjoyed into the history of jazz as a whole.
If you are new to jazz I hope you found the approach informative; if you are more familiar with jazz as a whole I hope I was able to communicate something of the event as it happened; and if you were actually there I hope your experience overlapped to some extent with my own. Because I wrote these reviews on the fly, I was able to show some of them to the musicians whose performance I reviewed, or tell them what I had written. I was pleased with their reactions, because they were often gracious in receiving the complements, and encouraging about my comments.
Tim Wall
