Don’t Explain

Every so often I get emails asking how to go about writing record reviews, which prompted me to write this list of advice. Needless to say, it’s only one take on the process, & probably others will disagree. I try to keep to these rules, though I’m not always successful in doing so. Give me a shout (at ndorward/at/ndorward/dot/com) if you have any comments or suggestions concerning this list.

The Racket

With many print and online journals, you won’t get paid except in review copies. & if you get paid, it won’t be much. So if money is important to you, stop right now.

Where to publish them: online is probably the way to go nowadays, either your own blog or site or one of the various music-review sites.

Decent sites and mags will arrange for review copies to be sent to you, usually. But I’ve found that I like to assert some control over what’s sent this way (i.e. minimize the dreck & maximize the good stuff), so I actively solicit review copies from labels and artists I admire, & try hard to place reviews of them in prominent journals. (You have to be quick off the bat, though, in approaching editors, or else someone else will grab the review copy & the slot.) If you become reasonably well-known discs will start arriving unsolicited from p.r. agencies, artists and labels — usually a very mixed bag but sometimes a gem comes this way.

Articles, interviews and liner-note gigs tend to pay better than record reviews, so the really on-the-ball reviewers are hustling those gigs. But no-one’s going to want (e.g.) liner notes from you if you’re an unknown, so you’ll have to spend your time in the trenches accumulating mileage & trustworthiness as a record reviewer. I’ve not yet done any liner notes (invitations are welcome ) but have lately been writing articles and features for print mags. Aside from the buzz of a larger cheque, the whole process of interviewing a musician, transcribing, editing, thinking and writing is simply far more interesting & challenging than crunching out the average 300-word record review.

Review copies tend to arrive without jewel cases (to reduce weight & save postage), with holes punched through the barcode or the cover clipped. Put the CD in a jewel case ASAP to avoid its getting damaged or lost. It can be very hard to locate a CD without a spine.

Lately many labels seem to be saving money (& discouraging resale of review copies) by sending out CDRs rather than proper CDs. The classier ones will at least send you the real McCoy once the review appears. Still, when it comes to deciding what to review & what not to review, I tend to put CDR copies at the lowest priority, for obvious reasons. (This is a different matter from review copies of CDR-only releases, which I have no problem with.)

Deadlines: these are usually somewhat flexible with magazines or online journals (newspapers are a different story). If you think you need more time, contact the editor as soon as you can and ask them the “real” deadline. Most deadlines are deliberately set early, so that editors won’t have to handle a huge last-minute influx of material. — Even though the deadline is flexible, though, don’t abuse this fact (something I’m often guilty of, being a last-minute type of person).

Writing Strategy

Be honest. Which usually means being positive but not ecstatic. In a given batch of CDs for review, most will be OK but nothing special; one or two will be superb; and there will be a few dogs. If you’re raving about all of them, or dumping on all of them, you’re in the wrong business. Establish a firm baseline of “OK but not exceptional” and then the reader will actually take you seriously when you praise a disc to the skies.

Listen hard, listen a lot. Unless the disc is a complete waste of time, give it at least three spins. Try a mix of different approaches: background listening, foreground listening; listening while taking mental notes; listening while taking pen-on-paper notes; listening critically; listening just for enjoyment; listening as sympathetically as possible, or as unsympathetically as possible. Don’t always start with track one, or you’ll get fuzzy on the later stages of the album. (Shuffle play is handy.)

During at least one “pass” in the listening process, keep careful track of the instruments and personnel. It’s amazing the number of records released with faulty instrumentation listings, or which omit to list all the musicians. Printed track timings and album timings are also not to be trusted (if you want an extreme example, take a look at the original Blue Note CD issue of Don Pullen’s New Beginnings).

Don’t shill. If you love an artist or label, say so, but your efforts to support them will ultimately be more effective if you don’t publish an ecstatic review of their every release.

Don’t grind axes. If you hate Wynton Marsalis or Keith Rowe or whoever, that’s fine: make your point one, two or even three times in print, eloquently and forcefully. Then do the right thing and move on, rather than flogging a dead horse. If you honestly dislike a musician or style, tell your editor not to send you their stuff after the first few times. (This doesn’t always work, admittedly: for instance, Ken Vandermark CDs keep popping up in my inbox every so often despite my efforts to dissuade editors from sending them this way.) You can always check back on an artist several years down the road — maybe by then they’ll have changed, or you’ll have changed.

Keep in mind that your response to a disc isn’t the only possible one. One problematic kind of disc to review is the “not my cup of tea” disc: you can see why someone else (a devotee of the genre or the artist in question) might like it, even love it — but somehow it does nothing for you. My usual approach with such recordings is to end the review with something like “Fans of _____ will enjoy this disc a lot.”

If you are prone to feeling guilty about writing pans, keep in mind that even a disc you consider completely meritless will inevitably garner some positive reviews. I’m continually surprised how obviously incompetent or flawed discs will get rave reviews. There are, of course, some musicians and labels who are outraged when their discs receive any negative (or even lukewarm) press, but that’s their problem.

Sound quality: if it’s poor or flawed, then you should mention it, even if it’s otherwise a good disc. Keep in mind that some flaws or quirks are more audible on certain stereo setups than on others, and headphones make sonic flaws more noticeable than ordinary speakers. — Note that some labels do have unusual recording aesthetics, too, which may be worth mentioning in a review: CIMP for instance favours a dry, uncompressed sound without close-miking, while labels like Smalls try for a live-in-the-studio sound that recalls the classic Rudy Van Gelder sound.

Style

The reason you’re doing this is not merely to have a thumbs-up-thumbs-down opinion of a CD or to receive a free copy of it, but to learn something from it and persuasively convey this to the reader. The best service you can do for a disc (whether it is a good or bad one) is to show that it made you think and feel something. So your job is to make a piece of prose that shows that you listened carefully to the disc, and which is distinctive enough it couldn’t be mistaken for a response to any other recording.

You don’t need to use technical musical terminology. In fact you probably shouldn’t. But if you do, use it correctly; if you’re unsure, check with a musician. I’m an amateur jazz pianist & though I have a grasp of the basics I try to avoid exposing my ignorance too much.

Attentive description is crucial. But avoid meaningless running commentary of the “this thunk follows that hiss” or “the tenor saxophonist solos first, followed by the trumpeter” persuasion. Increasingly, I’ve been trying to capture the general “flavour” of a CD rather than trying to follow its every turn of events. A good thing to consider when reviewing: what do you remember about a disc after it’s finished? What’s the mood or acoustic texture that you still hear in your mind? What did you make you think about? That’s what you need to capture.

Go out on a limb. In the rough draft go ahead & take as many risks as possible: oddball observations, jokes, wacky similes, colloquialisms, whatever. (After all if you’re not excited about music why are you doing this? You have to convey excitement, or at least involvement, somehow.) Then when it’s time to edit, go back & prune away the risky bits that fall flat on their face.

I like similes if well-turned. But they rarely are, are they? Still, I use them a lot.

Comparisons to better-known musicians are useful, if they are apposite. Some editors hate namedropping, though. How much and what kind of namedropping you can indulge in will depend on the audience of the journal you’re writing for.

Don’t engage in “elegant variation”: the kind of writing which turns a sentence like “The new 3-CD set from Verve is expensive” into “The latest triple-header to emerge from the late Norman Granz’s venerable platter-factory will set hungry punters back a good-sized pile of shekels.” If you write this way you just sound like a third-rate sportswriter.

Many style guides emphasize avoiding adjectives and adverbs in favour of nouns and verbs. (As Basil Bunting said about adjectives and adverbs: “They bleed nouns”.) I have mixed feelings about such strictures. You can go here for a useful polemic against them… but there is nonetheless a grain of truth to this stylistic rule. The real problem is syntax — too much reviewing is syntactically boring, as if the reviewer were only interested in syntax as a mortar to hold together whatever epithets & phrases he/she has come up with. Try not to make every sentence busy, invertebrate & overstuffed. Stylistic variety is the key, both within a review & between reviews.

How to write a pan: (1) Faint praise is the way to go 90% of the time. I might hate Brad Mehldau, but to write “The new Brad Mehldau disc is a total waste of time” just looks petty. This is far more effective: “Brad Mehldau’s mannerisms have become increasingly pronounced over the past few years. His new disc is unlikely to appeal to anyone not already a convert to his style.” The idea is to make something sound plain dull rather than (interestingly) irritating or provocative. (2) If it’s too bad for faint praise, despatch it briefly. Have some fun with it, if you can do so without meanspiritedness. (See my Aratori review for an example of the style.) (3) If the disc provides enough meat for a full-on critique, go ahead (cf. my David S. Ware piece for a rare example). This is the option I resort to when a disc has already received a lot of ludicrously positive reviews from boosterish critics or fans. But make sure you have something intelligent to say, rather than just jeering at the disc.

Keep in mind that “wrong” or unexpected words are often more powerful (& thus more convincing) than tepidly right ones. Take a look at my piece on Rives’ Fibres for an example of how to use negative description as a form of praise. Avoid blandness, unless you’re trying to make a disc sound bland.

Edit!

For god’s sake edit your work. Unedited prose is abominable.

Write long. Edit short. When you redraft you’ll find spots you want to expand on, but mostly you will find plenty to crunch down. 250-400 words is more than enough for 90% of what you’ll hear. Just because something is terrific doesn’t mean you should blather: brief, pungent recommendations are more effective than bales of well-meaning verbiage.

Dan Warburton constantly reminds me to read my prose aloud. It’s good advice. If you can’t get your tongue around a sentence, odds are that a reader will stumble over it too.

When editing, keep the big picture in mind, as well as Sam Johnson’s advice about what to do with a phrase you’re especially proud of: “Strike it out.” Often a word or phrase will be good, even excellent, in itself, but should be deleted for reasons of economy or to preserve the balance of the piece as a whole. (If you really think it’s a good one, just file it away for future reference. You’ll find it handy in a future review, perhaps of the same artist’s next disc.)

When you’re done, show the review to a friend or two and get comments. All writing should be seen by at least one other human being before publication. Then once the comments are in, revise the piece, sit on it overnight, reread it next morning, and if it’s OK send it off.

Don’t count on editors to fix typos or stylistic flaws. Unless you’re writing for a top-notch journal, your piece will either appear verbatim (if you’re lucky) or with a few extra errors inserted. Online journals usually go for the former approach; print journals for the latter. You won’t see proofs, either.

Before sending off a piece, check the names of the musicians, the album title and track titles, & the catalogue number.

Other writers

I spent a while pinching from Whitney Balliett, in particular rather foolhardily mimicking his bravura “ideal performance” descriptions, where rather than describing a particular track or live performance he creates a kind of synthesis of all the various strategies and tics and personal traits in a musician’s arsenal, squeezing them into an entire paragraph. (A good example of my efforts in this vein is my Mal Waldron review.) But it’s a dangerous style to imitate, of course. Lately I’ve been learning from Larry Kart, who writes far more conceptually, as if grasping the essence of what a musician is about: his particular way of viewing the world and how this finds expression in his style. It’s of course a dangerous style to imitate, too.

Read poetry, novels, nonfiction, philosophy, comic-books, whatever. There’s no point in writing if you don’t care about reading and thinking. Don’t bring it into your reviewing in a pretentious way though. I hate most “thought-pieces.”

Don’t be afraid to read other reviews of a disc you’re writing up: sometimes one gets a sinking “I can’t add anything to what’s already been said” feeling but more often you’ll find something you disagree with that may stimulate your own writing. Be careful, though, about pinching unverified factual/biographical information from other reviewers or from internet sources: sometimes erroneous information creeps into reviews & you don’t want to perpetuate it.

After it’s published

Once a piece has appeared, immediately notify the label and/or musician, especially if they sent the discs to you directly. (I realize this may take some courage if you turned in a pan.) It’s a good idea to send them an email with the full text of the review because (1) this prevents misquotation (many publicists and musicians are terrible typists and copyists, I’ve found) and (2) often the editor of the journal neglects to send a tearsheet to the label, or the label neglects to send it to the musician.

You put a lot of time & effort into writing the reviews (I hope!) – so don’t let them sink into oblivion. Once a print journal’s off the newsstands, the review will be to all intents & purposes buried. So put your old reviews online on your website to keep them in circulation. This isn’t just an ego thing: (1) it permits you to keep track of what you’ve written; (2) it helps support the album/artist, since a Googling will make it pop up (& thus give an album continued publicity for years after the review appeared); (3) you can fix mistakes that appeared in the printed version & present an “authorized” (unedited) version.

Pay attention to the copyright info in the journals in which you publish. If it says that the contents are (c) the journal, doublecheck with the editor that it’s OK for you to reprint material on your website. I’ve never had a problem, though usually editors request that you give details on where the piece first appeared. I usually wait about 4-6 months between first publication and posting it on the website, as a courtesy to the journals, though when the published version has been mangled I post the right text immediately.

Don’t be surprised to see your review ingeniously filleted by the artist or his/her publicist in future press releases: artfully selective quotation is a fact of life.

One of the nice things about writing reviews is positive correspondence from readers and musicians. But prepare to get some hate mail from irate labels and musicians too. (Pans can trigger a response, but I’ve found that the ones that get the nastiest responses are often the lukewarm reviews.) You can ignore such letters, or try to reply seriously, or pen a quick brush-off: there’s no hard and fast rule. But try to keep things brief and civil, at least on your side, even if the temptation is to give as good as you get. Keep in mind that these kinds of exchanges may get publicly circulated: don’t write anything in a private email that you don’t mind seeing distributed across the internet, because there’s no guarantee your correspondent will keep it to him/herself. The best containment strategy with any kind of heated exchange is to slow things down: don’t reply immediately, sit on your response for a few hours or a day, reread it before hitting “send,” and don’t fire off a barrage of emails or post several times in a row to a discussion-board thread.

And at last, we reach the sticky & controversial topic of the ultimate fate of unwanted review copies or duplicates. Every reviewer has his/her own views on the ethics of selling off review copies: my own take on this is that if I’ve written the review, I’m free to keep the disc or dispose of a disc as I like. Things get much trickier (or the conscience less easy) with discs that for one reason or another you can’t review or haven’t reviewed, of course… The classy thing is to try to find good homes for discs that have real merit (trade or gifts, especially to other critics or radio DJs); throw away the really poor ones that you can’t imagine inflicting on anyone else; & sell off the ones that remain. Musicians & labels tend to be all over the map in their opinion about the ethics of this situation — some very unrealistic (on the Canadian Jazztalk discussion list a couple posters were angry about secondhand record shops tout court, since musicians don’t get money from resales), some philosophical.