Jazz Up Your Writing

[Geri Cutcher]

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Are you an experienced songwriter? Or perhaps you have in-depth knowledge about writing lyrics? Are you an experienced top-line writer? Or perhaps you are a beat maker? Would you be interested in helping musicians to build their skills and understanding by contributing demonstration videos, reviews, articles and tutorials to the Songstuff music library? We rely upon musicians, and people working within the music industry, being willing to contribute to our knowledge base.

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The brilliant Jazz Views website celebrates ten years of exploring, sharing and promoting jazz this month. Well known for his support of jazz artists and love of the jazz community, founder Nick Lea has been tireless in his work to share great music with the world. It was a great pleasure to talk to Nick and explore how it all began and his hopes for the future.

The first edition of Jazz Views was founded in 2002 and ran for four and a half years. Initially the format was an email newsletter (I had just purchased my fist computer) with reviews of albums that I had bought, and this was emailed to friends. From this I started to receive emails from other people that had read the newsletter, and this encouragement and knowledge that the reviews were being read inspired me to develop the Jazz Views website. The idea with hindsight was quite simple, I just enjoyed writing and sharing my love of the music with others and this seemed a good way of doing just that.

This also gave me the confidence to approach some of the independent jazz labels in the UK, along with distributors to see if it was possible to obtain review copies of albums and arrange interviews with some of the musicians. As the number of albums for received for review increased, it became obvious that the site was growing quite rapidly and that I need some help, and I was lucky enough to meet Euan Dixon, Roy Booth, Ken Cheetham and Jack Kenny who have been writing for Jazz Views from the outset. Sadly, Roy retired from writing a few years ago and his contribution and input is greatly missed, but the others are still regular contributors bringing a wealth of knowledge with them.

The aim right from the very beginning was to share the music that I love with others. As the website continued to grow beyond my expectations the opportunity arose to review and interview some of the major UK and international musicians, and this in turn has brought more visitors to the website. Jazz Views has always tried to review as many albums as possible (but not as many as I would like to) by a diverse range of artists and styles that fall under the umbrella we call jazz. If by reading a review on the website someone goes away and buys a copy of the album and gets as much enjoyment from it as we have then it is a job well done. By the same token, if we can help musicians by reviewing their music and offering interviews and assist them get some exposure for their work then we have achieved what we set out to do.

Over the years Jazz Views has been fortunate to have some wonderful writers who have contributed unstintingly of their time and knowledge, many who have been writing for the site many years. As I mentioned earlier, Euan, Roy, Jack and Ken wrote for the first edition of the website, and when I started up Jazz Views again in 2012 these four stalwarts all immediately jumped back onboard. Other regular contributors include Chris Baber, George Cole, Eddie Myer and Jim Burlong, who has sadly retired from writing at present, and our newest contributor Isabel Marquez.

Regarding motivation and support, I think that self-motivation and love of the music keeps the writing team ticking over and I often feel that they support and motivate me with the quality of their writing.

I am always looking for new reviewers to assist with the increasing number of albums received for review. In the first instance any prospective writer can email us at jazz...@hotmail.co.uk. It would be useful to give a little information about yourself and your musical tastes, and maybe an example of your work.

Jazz Views is a highly valued publication and you are well known for supporting artists and the jazz community. What support do you need to continue doing such incredible work?

Jazz Views receives an incredible amount of support from the artists, distributors and media PR in supplying albums for review and advising of artists who are available for interview. The other way that we can support each other and the jazz scene in general is by sharing information and communicating. If you have enjoyed reading a review, interview or article on Jazz Views or any of the other excellent jazz sites then please share it. The more people that get to hear about the incredible music that is being produced and available the better. The pen maybe mightier than the sword, but the internet and social media is an important communication tool that has the potential to reach out and extend the audience for the music.

Commencers, I wish you a sexy, dangerous, jazz-shaped immortality. I wish you the touch of the hand of the dead through the page; I wish you the will, the courage, to resurrect them via your attention. The guts to deconstruct the lies. I wish you a daisy chain of memorable kisses that link you back to your ancestors, and forward to those writers you can barely imagine. I wish you the power of the threshold, the page that, as Gregory Orr has written, is shaped like a doorframe that stands at the seam between disorder and order, death and life. I wish you solitude, yes, but also loneliness, the aching, fruitful kind. And somewhere up ahead all of us, all of your teachers, will be waiting for you.

I recall our interview encounter one afternoon at a coffee shop in her Fort Greene neighborhood and how impressed I was at her perspectives on music, and how she skillfully engaged social justice & political responsibilities matters into her sense of the music. I was also delighted to learn her jazz lineage, as daughter of the late trumpeter Oliver Beener, and as the niece of Nellie and the great Thelonious Monk.

As Angelika continued our dialogue I recognized immediately that this was a centered young woman with a definite writing agenda and a fresh point of view on jazz music. Her writing reflected the perspectives of someone who had grown up with hip hop as another vivid point of musical reference and influence.

Welcome to episode 147 of the LJS Podcast where today we are taking a look at one of my compositions and exploring how some of the non-functional jazz harmony works within it. Often on this podcast, we cover functional harmony in jazz standards, but this time we discover how you can take that knowledge and start to break the rules. Listen in!

In this composition, I use a lot of non-functional harmony. This means that not all of the harmony can be related to a tonic or home key center. In fact, it sometimes can be a disservice to try to do that.

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