Saturday, November 16, 2024

The 19th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll Begins

Back in 2006, Francis Davis decided to supplement his annual end-of-year top-ten at the Village Voice by running a poll of a circle of critics "currently living in New York and/or writing for New York-based publications." I qualified, not as a resident (although I had lived there in the late 1970s), but because I was writing the Voice's jazz consumer guide -- which, in an effort to fill Gary Giddins' shoes, added breadth of coverage to Davis's depth.

Davis always insisted on printing every individual ballot, but in 2009 the Voice's IT department balked, so music editor Rob Harvilla asked me to post them on one of my websites. When Davis left the Voice, he decided to continue the poll, and went looking for a new host. By then, Harvilla had left the Voice, and landed at the music streaming service Rhapsody, where he could sponsor the poll. Davis asked me to help, so I did, as I continued to do, as the poll later moved to NPR and ArtsFuse. (In 2022, I wrote a history of the poll, at least in terms of my involvement.)

Early on, Davis did everything, and just dumped whatever he had on me at the end. Which turned out, as the poll grew over 100 and up towards 150 critics -- now nationwide, plus a small contingent of international critics -- I felt the need to get organized and mechanized, eventually writing some software to count the ballots and format the web pages. By then I had made myself indispensable, and as Davis in recent years has been beset by declining health, he wound up trusting me to take his baby over. I think 2022 was the tipping point from which I took over (with him lurking).

While we're still in touch, this year it's pretty much just me, so I've started to change things a bit. My first big change was back in June, when I decided to run a Mid-Year Poll. Expecting a light turnout, I changed the point-weights for ranked ballots, compressing the range from 10-to-1 down to 3-to-1. I've never done a systematic study of it, but I've always suspected his scheme of distorting the results. This also gave me a chance to get rid of the 5.5 points for unranked ballots. Unfortunately, that didn't get rid of fractional point values, but they seem like less of an anomaly now. All of that required some hacking, but it's done now, and I'm generally happy with the new scheme (and got literally zero blowback, probably a combination of don't care and didn't notice), so I'm carrying it forward.

I also increased the Rara Avis -- Davis's preferred term, which I've never understood but am slowly getting used to -- ballot choices from 3 to 5 (with the option, as always, of fewer, even zero), which turned out to be widely welcomed. I also dispensed with the special categories (Vocal, Latin, Debut), which often seemed to me like more trouble than they were worth. Davis urged me to reconsider, so I have, but I've rethought how they work. I intend to write this up more precisely and include it in the supplementary documentation on the poll website, but the gist of it is that I want to encourage people who care most about those categories to offer more picks, so that we wind up with a better picture of the category. Davis's rules -- one pick per category, which if in your top-ten has to be the top eligible pick there -- resulted in short lists that were often totally swept by one breakout artist (e.g., Cécile McLorin Savant in Vocal, Miguel Zenón in Latin, and whoever Blue Note's rookie of the year was in Debut; those people will still win under the new system, but at least they'll have some competition).

I have several underlying considerations in making these changes. I bring two basic skills to this poll: I'm a critic (which is to say, someone who observes and deconstructs to figure out how things work), and I'm an engineer (which is someone who builds things to work better). So one big thing I try to do is to make it easier for more people to vote, while also making it easier for me to manage the process. One thing I've noticed in previous years is that we create a lot of churn when trying to enforce arbitrary rules, so I've tried to reduce this by allowing more flexibility. Some time ago, we decided that "Latin" and "Vocal" are whatever the voter thinks they are. This year, I'm further relaxing the rules on New vs. Old music, and on Debut -- I'm still providing guidelines, and I may note what appear to be anomalous choices, but I'm not into forcing things, especially when I can get good data easier.

I started calling this the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll a couple years back, after several voters had coined the term. It seemed like a good idea, not just to honor him but to help keep his vision for the poll front and center. He always saw the voters as colleagues, and the poll as part of the process by which we individuals come to think of ourselves as a community. In continuing this poll, I hope to serve our community, and perhaps to extend it. Jazz is good for us, and good for the world.

One constant struggle I have in running the poll is figuring out who should vote, inviting them, and getting them to respond. Davis did most of that work, even recently, and always struck me as much better connected than I am. I've inherited his lists, and added a few names along the way, and will continue to do so. You might look at last year's voter list, and see if there is anyone else you think we should extend invitations to. (We have sent invitations to several dozen more people. Turnout is usually about 75% of those invited, with the Mid-Year about half that, but the previous voter list is the only one I can share here.)

I have a mail list based on my server with most of these names on it, and I can send notices to them pretty easily, but due to the "poor reputation" of my server it seems that only about half of those messages actually reach their destination. (In many cases, the mail is flagged as "spam" and diverted to the recipient's spam folder, so it's a good practice to check yours, and do whatever you can to allow delivery of this mail.) I sent a notice out yesterday, to kick off this year's poll. For anyone who should have received it but didn't, here is the letter:

Just a brief note to get things going. Yes, we are running another (our 19th annual) Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I missed my self-imposed deadline of sending ballot invitations out by November 15, but you should receive yours sometime in the next week. Meanwhile, if you're on this mailing list, consider yourself invited. You can find a rough draft of the invitation here.

If you want to get this over with now (in which case, bless you), just grab the file, follow the instructions, and email it to me. I'm making a couple tweaks to what we've done in the past. As in the Mid-Year Poll, your Rara Avis ballot can list up to 5 (instead of 3) albums (anything recorded in 2014 or before belong there; anything later in New Releases, but I'm trying to do less bickering as I get older). I'm also reusing the points scheme from the Mid-Year Poll, which allows extra points for higher-ranked records, but no so many as to produce the distortions we got under the 10-to-1 point scheme. Those changes are easy for me, because I've already done the programming.

The other tweak will be in the Vocal/Latin/Debut categories, and this I'm going to have to do some programming for. I'll explain it in more detail when I do, but I figured the idea here was to generate more album lists, so I didn't like capping the list at one album each (I'm allowing 3 now, and if anyone seriously want to argue for 5, I might allow that). Moreover, I'm dispensing with the requirement that if you vote for an album in your top-ten list, you have to vote for it in the category list. I'm going to come up with some way to count eligible albums from top-ten lists in their categories, so what you list under the category is always extra. You can, if that's your thing, pick 10 Latin albums under New Releases, and add 3 more under Latin. It would help me if you designate which New Releases picks you think belong to which categories. We've given voters a lot of leeway on Latin and Vocal in the past. I don't want to impose my definitions on you, so it helps if you help me here.

I don't have a precise definition of Debut yet, but will work on it. We've been very strict about that in the past, and I think we should be less strict. One thing I do think is that this should be an individual, and not a group (maybe if everyone in the groups is strictly a debut, but that rarely happens). So this, too, will be more your choice, with less pushback from me (although I will reject any vote that strikes me as a prank).

The website will be updated as I have more information. I will try to answer most questions there, and you can help by asking me questions. I have a way to print out a list of albums that have votes, and possibly to break them down by category, which could generate a debut list. I know of one album that was released in two physical pieces but is really intended as a single album (I hear the artist blames the label), so I'll rule on and note things like that there.

I use this mail list for announcements, so respond to me, not to the list (which won't work, but leaves me stuff to clean up). While this list is pretty comprehensive, we've been plagued in the past by spam filters that, for no reason I can fathom, just don't like me. I can get around that by mailing individual invites out, but that takes me many hours, so I only want to go through that once. I'm going to sign up for a commercial email list service, and move everyone onto it. Hopefully that will work better, which will allow me to offer updates and nagging. Don't expect (or fear) a lot of mail, but be aware that something different will be coming. I'd advise you to check you spam directories, but if you're reading this, you don't need that advice, and if you're not, it wouldn't help.

I've had a couple people offer to help with various tasks. It's enough that I should probably set up an admin discussion list. If you want to get in on that, either to help or just to lurk, let me know.

One perennial question is who else should be invited? Let me know if you have any suggestions. That, plus nitpicking on the website, are likely to be high -priority discussion items.

I don't really have any news I can share about Francis Davis's health, other than that his participation in this his Poll is greatly diminished. I've been involved in it since its inception, and have done most of the work for several years now. I appreciate the continued trust you've shown in me in taking this over. Thanks.

I should probably clarify one thing. Although everyone on the mail list this was sent to is eligible and invited to vote, not everyone who we mean to invite is on the list. Moreover, history shows that only about half of the people on the list actually see the emails (mostly due to spam filtering). I have a more robust method of sending invitations, which is to run a form letter through Thunderbird's MailMerge extension, which turns it into a separate, customized letter for each recipient. Those drafts are them stuck in an outbox queue, from which I can send them one-by-one. (My SMTP server chokes if I try to automate sending.) This process takes 3-4 hours, beyond writing the letter, so I don't like to do it. I am going to do this when I get the lists sorted out better, hopefully in 3-5 days, but rather than wait that long, I used the mail list, and now this post, to get the ball rolling. Nice that I already have four ballots waiting to be counted.

We're looking for critics with credentials: mostly writers, although we also have a pretty substantial sampling of radio journalists (Davis was much more tuned into that world than I am, but like writers they are cultivated by publicists, so they are exposed to a wider range of new music than normal consumers, and have some practice at picking out what they prefer). Nowadays, credentials can even extend down to personal blogs -- you don't have to make a living as a professional critic (which, in any case, is nearly impossible these days), but to qualify you have to pursue this public service seriously.

We've generally avoided inviting two especially knowledgeable groups of people, who seemingly have conflicts of interest: musicians, and publicists. This isn't a hard prohibition, but I have retained Davis's rule about not voting for any record you have personal involvement in (which for critics often means writing liner notes; many critics also play music, but that seems to cause few problems). I'm open to considering exceptions, but need to see some open-mindedness.

This is not a "readers poll" or "fan poll," although in my experience there are many fans who are knowledgeable and discerning enough to rank as critics. During the Mid-Year Poll, I toyed with the idea of tabulating ballots from non-critics, but in the end I got virtually none. One thing I concluded from this is that readers polls are a measure of how many readers you have. As I have very few, it's hard to get a decent sample. So even if I wanted to run a fan poll, I would be very hard pressed to do so. Still, I would be curious if anyone wants to submit an unsolicited ballot. If you do have credentials, please point them out, which may get you qualified. Even if you don't, I might just factor your list into my EOY Aggregate (which includes most publications, at least as collated by Album of the Year -- which I find most useful among its various competitors -- but also lots of personal lists, mostly from my own social media hangouts).

As noted in the letter, I still have a lot of work to do on the website, as well as ambitions to rework the whole thing to make it more complete and coherent. If you are interested in helping on this, contact me (or use the question form, and I'll consider adding you to a more technical mailing list. (I'm still shopping for mail list software. Depending on what I find, I may break out several lists.)

Since I'm posting, a couple more personal notices. As I explained last week, I've given up on writing weekly Speaking of Which posts. However, I have, added a few more items to last week's post, especially as I've found open tabs with articles I meant to mention, or marginally later "post-mortem" arguments (starting, as these things often do, in the "chatter" section). But I haven't added new news items, such as anything on Trump's post-election appointments (horrifying as they are). Part of this is cost-benefit analysis, but part of it is also post-traumatic stress desensitization. I'm already way too conscious of what's happening to feel the need to research it further.

I've gotten some very nice comments on the last post, which I appreciate. Some were included in questions, which I will in due course attempt to answer. I'm making more regular entries in my notebook, which is available but not something I publicize. I tweeted one article recommendation, and may do more as I see fit. We'll see what else it makes sense to write and post. Music Week will continue on its usual schedule, at least through the end of the year. I'll probably offer updates on the Poll both here and on X. (I was going to do one on X today, then decided it would be better to post this first, then link to it.

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