Went to bed feeling uneasy last night, and woke up feeling worse. The cause was an email mentioning that I had been dropped from automatic service by a relatively important jazz label because they noticed that I was no longer writing for The Village Voice. That in fact was untrue: the Voice continues to publish Jazz Consumer Guides as I write them. The pace has slowed a little bit: three in 2008 (2/12, 5/13, 9/16) instead of the usual four, with most of the gap the result of my construction work in Detroit last fall and back home ever since. The nearly 5-month gap from 9/16/2008 to 2/10/2009 was the longest ever, but it's not like I fell off the ends of the earth: I've kept Jazz Prospecting going, with notices even if I skip a week now and then. The next Jazz CG will come out in late May; even if it gets delayed in the usual schedule squeeze we're looking at no more than 4 months. The one after that shouldn't take more than 3 months to get to print -- it's basically done now, so will depend more on the Voice's space and pacing than on anything I do.

The specific damage here is easy enough to fix. Not knowing I had been cut off (let alone why), a while back I requested and received some albums I had missed. They actually loom large in the next two Jazz CGs. Still, the episode reminds me how precarious this venture is. I can't do the sort of wide-ranging sort that I do without lots of help from labels and publicists. I don't have a purchasing budget, or any sort of grant support, and I'm barely paid for the writing. It hurts whenever I lose any of that support: by limiting my access to things that might be worthwhile, it undermines what I'm trying to do with the column; but also, I tend to be overly sensitive to slights, no doubt because the whole project is so precarious.

I flop back and forth on thinking that my problem is me. I'm not as sharp a critic as I'd like, or as skillful a writer, and I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as I'd be if I managed to devote myself more fully to criticism. I'm generally pleased with the finished Jazz Consumer Guide columns, but most Jazz Prospecting notes are hacked out so quickly and roughly they can't be of much value. (E.g., when I wind up describing a skillful but not especially interesting piano trio as "nicely done.") Still, criticism is subject to such systematic problems that it's hard to see where the quality of criticism even comes into play. The core problem is that one can never know the value of information (or entertainment) in advance. That value can only be established by consuming the product, at which point it has lost its cash value. (One could imagine a tipping scheme, but you barely have to articulate it to see its unattractiveness.) We make up for that core problem through a various feints and teases, all designed to wrap the product in mystique without revealing too much about it. Critics fit into this uneasily -- our interests poorly defined and often compromised, with not even our raison d'être broadly conceded, either by producers or consumers. Nor does it help that there are two sets of each: product and media.

Like everything else, producers are far better organized than consumers. Whether I satisfy my readers -- make them feel better informed, help them make better decisions -- ultimately matters little to the publisher who offers me space and pays me to write because the media product combines so many different things that none stand out -- at least enough to rock the bureaucracy (under normal conditions). As such, critics have tenuous relationships with their publishers, testy ones with the industry, and little in the way of support to fall back on from their readers. Few make a career of this, which means that knowledge fragments if anything faster than it accumulates. Even the few critics who have managed to persist, like Robert Christgau, have never found it easy. That I know Christgau as well as I do does little to help my self-confidence in this regard.

As long as criticism is stuck in its current economic ruts nothing much is going to change. Key line from the email above: "the days of more than 40-50 people in the US automatically getting their releases are over." That shows you how tiny the stakes are in trying to review jazz: not just how few critics get to hear records -- something to keep in mind next time you see a year-end critics poll -- but how few readers then can deliver the message to. Moreover, this is a self-reinforcing cycle: publications cut back on review space, labels cut back on review copies, consumers buy uninformed or not at all -- the vicious circles end in collapse. I haven't bailed out yet, but days like this make me think about it.

I can think of ways out of this, but they start sounding utopian real fast. That might be worth going into some day, as a mental exercise if nothing else. But for now I'm feeling helpless.