That's great to hear! I'm sure being in charge of the jazz listings gives you something to be excited about at work and it's nice that you are working from inside the system to make change. Congrats!

Great stuff Eric. I recently re-watched First Contact and was re-seduced by the idea of space travel as a unifying force to rally mankind. Much of my youth was spent thus deluded; reading this article was a welcome retreat to those days of building model rockets and reading about Wernher Von Braun. I have since given up on space exploration, but I'm glad there are still people out there fighting for it.

Wow, that was a blast from the past. When I first opened up the blog I thought I had the wrong one. I am well familiar with this picture from the various times I visited Type and Tonic waiting for the next post. Hopefully this is not you last post here. That project sounds very exciting! I hope that your experience recording voices for NNN will come in helpful. I've been listening to a lot more NPR recently because my boyfriend has a car. Best of luck, can't wait to hear how it turns out!

I like the direction you're going with this blog. I think the problems you have articulated so far --over-emphasis on tradition leading to stagnation, and the lack of genuine criticism-- are problems faced by many creative endeavors/communities. I saw several parallels to issues I have noticed in the LEGO fan community, and the webseries production community (which I am just beginning to dip my toes into). As a casual jazz fan I must admit that my collection consists mostly of the old masters. I got into The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau last year purely by accident, and I haven't really had a chance to branch out. Part of this is because music is only one of my many interests and jazz is only one many genres I'm interested in. But another problem is definitely the lack of mainstream coverage of jazz. It's easy enough for me to stumble across reviews of the latest altrock albums in the places I go for reviews of movies, TV shows, etc. But to find out about new jazz stuff, I'm going to have to got to a niche site, which is probably going to overwhelm me and (as you point out) maybe not help me figure out what's worth listening to and what isn't. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this and hopefully find some awesome new jazz along the way. (I just figured out what the header pic is - very clever.)