An Editor Recollects
ISSUE 100, June 1992
Editor: Richard Cook
I hate to invoke the Grateful Dead at a moment when our letters page seems ready to be besieged by outraged Deadheads; but, in Robert Hunter's phrase, what a long, strange trip it's been. After ten years, here is the 100th issue of The Wire: a moment to reflect, and one to pay an homage or two.
When Anthony Wood started The Wire in 1982, jazz in Britain - a subject which was and has remained one of the central building-blocks of the magazine - was at a particularly low ebb. The dreary days of the '70s were gone, but there was little cheer for marginal musics at a point where the music media was hung up entirely on pop and little else. Our founder's insistence that there should be a space for, say, Steve Lacy, harold Land, Eric Dolphy, John Stevens and Max Roach - all of whom were featured in the first issue - now seems like a prescient insight which many others have followed up. But it has taken a long time. It's easy to say that "we were the first" - but we were. There were a few lone voices (including the undersigned) at work in the environs of the cok press, but it took the focusing of The Wire to help the change take effect.
The change? It still leads back to the beginnin of 1986, when we put a not-quite-unknown saxophonist named Courtney Pine on the cover of issue 25. By that point, with a quarter-century of issues under its belt, The Wire had inched its way out of darkness and into a sort of half-lit obscurity. The magazine had turned monthly in the autumn of 1984, had moved to the sheltering auspices of Namara, and had brought in a new editor and editorial team. Jazz wasn't exactly sweeping the nation, but a rumble had started taking place in dance clubs: people were cutting a rug to the sound of Art Blakey and old Blue Note albums. Jazz style was being rediscovered by Thatcher's children, and it's black-and-white methodology was starting to figure on trendsetters' shopping lists. And then came Courney Pine, and Journey To The Urge Within, a bestseller which overturned the idea that jazz had no bankability.
Pine's success was a slightly belated echo of the inroads which the Marsalis family had been making into bourgeois listening habits on the other side of the ocean. In their respective wake came many other musicians: Andy Sheppard, Loose Tubes, Jazz Warriors and all their offshoots over here, countless neocons and M-Basers and Lower East Siders and new fusionist in the USA. As the '80s rolled forward , it was becoming clear that our brief of covering all this - and whatever other interesting and un-main-streamed music was swimming into our ken - was starting to seem overwhelming.
There has been many a time when it's seemed impossible. The staggering thing isn't that we were able to cover so much, but that so much of what we covered remained the way it was when we started: all but unrecognised. We've intermittently run what-is-to-be-done pieces on the improvised music scene, cried warnings at the homogenisation of world music (a term that scarcely even existed when we began) and the term "minority", but the depressing thing, after ten years, is to see how little has changed for so many players and their circuits of work. We started the British Jazz Awards to try and do something about some part of that; five such tries have sent out some useful ripples.
Still, a striking change has taken place. It's all about (as we've said in some of our marketing meetings) awareness. Maybe consumers aren't flocking to record shops to buy in the new Derek Bailey or Borbetomagus albums, but those tickles of outsider-activity have started to seem less and less freaksih to a music world that is happy to make room for performers such as Mixmaster Morris (issue 77). With technology advancing at an ever more feverish pace, music's education of its audience has created a new tolerance of the avant garde. Jazz, improvisation and Christian Marclay have made waves enough to create the impression that a wider world has opened up to these sensibilities. Good enough, perhaps, for an old-wave radical like myself.
Nobody goes into this game to win unstinting praise, and we've enjoyed an occasionally comprehensive sequence of attacks and dismissals as well as a few words of praise. None more so than in the aftermath of issue 88, which still resounds in the midns of many as the day The Wire sold off its family silver. The name "Miachel Jackson" still finds lips curling and voices cracking indignation. Disquiet has died down and sales have increased, actually, and I hope some of those few who chose to drop their subscription at least took the troubl to pick up a copy of issue 98 to enjoy their free CD. (Something else that wasn't even around when we started. It still seems not so long ago that we ran special CD columns at the end of Soundcheck; now, there are almost no LPs reviewed at all.)
Everything has changed; but much remains the same. Zen students can ponder on the wider significance. But our mission, which we perhaps unwisely decided to accept, has stayed much as it always has. To pass on information, opinion and debate on music and its associated touchstones, with a special emphasis on those issues and areas which, well, you can't read about anywhere else. As we look towards the second hundred, I'm not sure whether to be amused or discouraged by the point that we remain, in so many ways, a singleton voice.
Whatever the case, it's a voice that will have to speak in tones other than my own from the next issue onwards. As a valedictory note, a word of gratitude to all who've worked on behalf of the magazine over the last ten years, our legion of writers and photographers, and a few inner-circle names who've seen us through many a crisis: especially Tim Cochrane, Jan Diakow, Tony Danaher and our proprietor, Naim Attalah. Anyway, as Mort Sahl would say, onward: I hope you enjoy our 100th issue.
R D Cook
Editor
Editor: Richard Cook
I hate to invoke the Grateful Dead at a moment when our letters page seems ready to be besieged by outraged Deadheads; but, in Robert Hunter's phrase, what a long, strange trip it's been. After ten years, here is the 100th issue of The Wire: a moment to reflect, and one to pay an homage or two.
When Anthony Wood started The Wire in 1982, jazz in Britain - a subject which was and has remained one of the central building-blocks of the magazine - was at a particularly low ebb. The dreary days of the '70s were gone, but there was little cheer for marginal musics at a point where the music media was hung up entirely on pop and little else. Our founder's insistence that there should be a space for, say, Steve Lacy, harold Land, Eric Dolphy, John Stevens and Max Roach - all of whom were featured in the first issue - now seems like a prescient insight which many others have followed up. But it has taken a long time. It's easy to say that "we were the first" - but we were. There were a few lone voices (including the undersigned) at work in the environs of the cok press, but it took the focusing of The Wire to help the change take effect.
The change? It still leads back to the beginnin of 1986, when we put a not-quite-unknown saxophonist named Courtney Pine on the cover of issue 25. By that point, with a quarter-century of issues under its belt, The Wire had inched its way out of darkness and into a sort of half-lit obscurity. The magazine had turned monthly in the autumn of 1984, had moved to the sheltering auspices of Namara, and had brought in a new editor and editorial team. Jazz wasn't exactly sweeping the nation, but a rumble had started taking place in dance clubs: people were cutting a rug to the sound of Art Blakey and old Blue Note albums. Jazz style was being rediscovered by Thatcher's children, and it's black-and-white methodology was starting to figure on trendsetters' shopping lists. And then came Courney Pine, and Journey To The Urge Within, a bestseller which overturned the idea that jazz had no bankability.
Pine's success was a slightly belated echo of the inroads which the Marsalis family had been making into bourgeois listening habits on the other side of the ocean. In their respective wake came many other musicians: Andy Sheppard, Loose Tubes, Jazz Warriors and all their offshoots over here, countless neocons and M-Basers and Lower East Siders and new fusionist in the USA. As the '80s rolled forward , it was becoming clear that our brief of covering all this - and whatever other interesting and un-main-streamed music was swimming into our ken - was starting to seem overwhelming.
There has been many a time when it's seemed impossible. The staggering thing isn't that we were able to cover so much, but that so much of what we covered remained the way it was when we started: all but unrecognised. We've intermittently run what-is-to-be-done pieces on the improvised music scene, cried warnings at the homogenisation of world music (a term that scarcely even existed when we began) and the term "minority", but the depressing thing, after ten years, is to see how little has changed for so many players and their circuits of work. We started the British Jazz Awards to try and do something about some part of that; five such tries have sent out some useful ripples.
Still, a striking change has taken place. It's all about (as we've said in some of our marketing meetings) awareness. Maybe consumers aren't flocking to record shops to buy in the new Derek Bailey or Borbetomagus albums, but those tickles of outsider-activity have started to seem less and less freaksih to a music world that is happy to make room for performers such as Mixmaster Morris (issue 77). With technology advancing at an ever more feverish pace, music's education of its audience has created a new tolerance of the avant garde. Jazz, improvisation and Christian Marclay have made waves enough to create the impression that a wider world has opened up to these sensibilities. Good enough, perhaps, for an old-wave radical like myself.
Nobody goes into this game to win unstinting praise, and we've enjoyed an occasionally comprehensive sequence of attacks and dismissals as well as a few words of praise. None more so than in the aftermath of issue 88, which still resounds in the midns of many as the day The Wire sold off its family silver. The name "Miachel Jackson" still finds lips curling and voices cracking indignation. Disquiet has died down and sales have increased, actually, and I hope some of those few who chose to drop their subscription at least took the troubl to pick up a copy of issue 98 to enjoy their free CD. (Something else that wasn't even around when we started. It still seems not so long ago that we ran special CD columns at the end of Soundcheck; now, there are almost no LPs reviewed at all.)
Everything has changed; but much remains the same. Zen students can ponder on the wider significance. But our mission, which we perhaps unwisely decided to accept, has stayed much as it always has. To pass on information, opinion and debate on music and its associated touchstones, with a special emphasis on those issues and areas which, well, you can't read about anywhere else. As we look towards the second hundred, I'm not sure whether to be amused or discouraged by the point that we remain, in so many ways, a singleton voice.
Whatever the case, it's a voice that will have to speak in tones other than my own from the next issue onwards. As a valedictory note, a word of gratitude to all who've worked on behalf of the magazine over the last ten years, our legion of writers and photographers, and a few inner-circle names who've seen us through many a crisis: especially Tim Cochrane, Jan Diakow, Tony Danaher and our proprietor, Naim Attalah. Anyway, as Mort Sahl would say, onward: I hope you enjoy our 100th issue.
R D Cook
Editor