[A] Looks like tomorrow, Friday, January 10, probably late afternoon -- i.e., about when most PR-savvy organizations (businesses, politicians, etc.) release bad news they hope will disappear or at least fade before the next week picks up. Not our scheme, but after promising several earlier dates, I just kept writing two long essays -- which, quite frankly, I could have spent another week or two on. The Arts Fuse got my essays on Wednesday, and their editor is doing a good job of turning them around quickly. Once they publish, I'll open up my website, so you can see which albums tied for 613rd place, who voted for them, and what else they voted for. Also links to the essays on Arts Fuse, including a shorter one by Francis Davis.

[A] As for the grades, Robert Christgau gave me my start as a writer, and we remain good friends. I built his website, at the center of which is a database of his short reviews and album grades. He adapted the old school grade system (substituting E for F), so back in the 1990s when I started compiling lists of albums I had, I tagged them with grades using his framework. That way I could readily pick out a particularly good Jackie McLean or Johnny Hodges album, and remind myself of others. He asked me to write a Jazz Consumer Guide, basically in his style, c. 2005, which I did for the Village Voice up to 2011. Since then, as long as I kept getting free records, I figured it would be a public service to write and post a bit about them. The grades are a convenience: they save me from having to craft language to the reader's basic question of how much I liked any given record. Sometimes, when I was short of time and/or just wanted to move on, they sufficed as a review. At least, the reader knows that I listened to the record, gave it a bit of thought, and put it in the context of everything else I've ever heard.

Around 1990, Christgau decided that life was to short to waste time listening to and writing about records he disliked or didn't care about, which given that his focus was to find more records that he really did want to write about, came to include the great mass of records that are accomplished and enjoyable but not quite exciting enough. The latter made up most of his previous B+ tranche, and he came to ignore most of them, but he spent enough time on some that seemed promising that he wound up writing one-liners on them and filing them away as "honorable mentions." When he compiled his 1990s book, he sorted those into three tiers, marking them *, **, and ***, but in the old framework, they were all various shadings of B+.

When I started writing Jazz Consumer Guide, I followed his format, with short reviews of A and A- records up top, followed by a long list of roughly sorted "honorable mentions," and a shorter list of "duds" -- sometimes, as he was doing at the time, I'd pick one out to write something scathing about, which was the least pleasant part of the job, but oddly (or so I thought) the one bit I regularly got fan mail for. I ran across two big problems rather quickly, which were both effects of the basic fact that the overwhelming majority of jazz albums are actually very good: the musicians have superb skills, allowing them to develop and execute complex ideas. Some, for sure, went in directions I didn't particularly care for, and some of those wound up on my "duds" list, not because they were objectively defective records, but because for some reason they rubbed me the wrong way. (The most infamous case was Maria Schneider, which I almost certainly rated too low, but I reacted more harshly back then to what I felt was excessive adulation.)

The bigger problem was that I had many more really good records than I ever had space to mention. It occurred to me that B+ was such a large space that it should be subdivided, so I adapted Christgau's star-system, making sure to include the B+ for clarity. Once I did this, my possible HM lists matched pretty closely with the top B+(***) tier. I also noticed that as much as I liked, or at least was impressed by, the B+(*) tier, they were records I would never return to. The middle tier turns out to be a mixed bag, with elements of very good mixed in with a lot of very competent. Of course, I've also given up any pretense that these grades are anything more than reflections of my own personal quirks -- hopefully everyone takes them as such. They may be found useful by some people who find my views and tastes interesting. And they are no doubt resented by artists who find themselves short-changed (sometimes after careful deliberation on my part, but much more often with only the most fleeting concern).

The little bracketed abbreviations at the end of many reviews indicate the source that I listened to: [bc] means Bandcamp, [sp] Spotify, [yt] YouTube, [cd] and [cdr] are physical CDs (most these days are promos, but the latter indicates that they came with nothing resembling real packaging), [dl] are things I actually downloaded (mostly promos these days), and there are a few more -- the monthly archives have a legend. I started this when I folded several separate review columns into a weekly report. At that time, my streaming source was Rhapsody, so it was the default -- I previously called the column Rhapsody Streamnotes -- but I felt that CDs should be noted as such, and the other variants just fell into line. While in theory it shouldn't matter where I hear something from, in practice these things make for subtle differences.

[A] While I'm pleased to hear that you enjoy and appreciate my work on the jazz critics poll, etc., I have no interest in checking out your platform, and not just because these days I never engage in "live music experiences." I would be interested in hearing more about you, what interests you in jazz, and what the jazz world looks like from Serbia. Unless, of course, this is just AI-generated spam, in which case I'm slightly impressed, not so much just by the content but by the uncomfortable suspicion that I'm its target.