[jja-announce] call for 10 bests -- committee needs, IAJE plans, holiday party, etc.

[Jazzmandel at aol.com]

Dear members, 

Please send your 10-best of the year CD lists to me for posting at Jazzhouse, 
as in previous years. And ID yourselves the way you want to be known at the 
bottom of the lists, which may be in any order you please, and annotated or 
not. Thanks for that. 

The JJA has a significant # of members with new books out -- including Gary 
Giddins, Gene Santoro, W. Royal Stokes, Alyn Shipton, Dan Morgenstern and Todd 
Jenkins, with other new volumes coming in the next month or so from Michelle 
Mercer (bio of Wayne Shorter) and Mike Zwerin (memoir of his years in Paris 
writing for the Int'l Herald Trib). Congrats to all these and whoever I'm 
forgetting; their works may be just the gifts you want to give yourself or 
jazz-interested friends, and these books will be featured in the Jazzhouse bookstore as 
soon as we can get their ISBN #s up; if you buy via the bookstore's ordering 
procedure, the JJA gets a small kickback. 

The organization has a couple current committee needs: notably, someone to 
help Todd Jenkins keep current with the Last Post. If you are a good, quick obit 
writer, please contact me or Todd at Epistrophy at aol.com. The Last Post is one 
of Jazzhouse's most often visited areas, and has a very good reputation as an 
accurate, informative resource.

Matt Sumera is currently devising a Membership Survey, the JJA's first, which 
will ask about members' expectations and desires for the organization. We 
hope to get the survey out to you online very soon, but may not be able to do so 
prior to the IAJE conference in Long Beach Ca starting Jan. 5, at which the 
newly elected Interim Board will have an important meeting (but not our first -- 
we're planning an online meeting in the next couple of days). The upshot of 
this is: If you have ideas you'd like the JJA to implement, now's a good time 
to let Matt and/or the Interim Board Directors (who are Yvonne Ervin, James 
Hale, Willard Jenkins, Fred Jung, R. Andrew Lepley, Steve Schwartz, and me) know 
what's on yr mind.

David Adler, editor of Jazz Notes, is in need of book reviewers. His e-mail, 
as well as those of the Interim Bd Directors, is at Jazzhouse in the lounge's 
membership database. 

At IAJE, Paul DeBarros and Dan Ouellette will again present Critics Clinics 
as part of our ongoing mentoring program. We hope to include a veteran radio 
broadcaster as well as JJA member writers among the consulting Crits this year, 
so that emerging radio-ologists can get some advise about working in that 
field. Also, I will moderate a panel on Grow Your Own: If There's No Outlet for 
Your Work, Build One (or somesuch title), with Fred Jung of LA All About Jazz, 
Jon Poses of Columbia Missouri's Jazz Review, Neil Tesser of Chicago (now 
streaming online) radio show Jazz Ahead, and others. There will be a membership 
meeting -- one of our annual nationwide members' meetings, as required by our 
corporate charter -- as well as the Interim Board meeting. Reports on these will 
follow in January. 

Willard Jenkins has agreed to head a Mentoring Committee; his particular 
interest is reaching out to minority jazz journalists, and we hope to set up a 
scholarship program in the name of the late Clarence Atkins as a start. If you 
have an interest in this committee, please contact Willard 
(muzikmuse at comcast.net) and cc me. Willard is also trying to reinstate the JJA DC chapter's 
Listening Tests, perhaps at the offices of WPFW-FM. More on that as it develops. 

The New England JJA Chapter held a fabulously successful panel discussion 
last Monday on the Boston Jazz Scene: What's happening, what's going to happen. 
Thanks to the pr work in advance by Dawn Sighn, there were articles about the 
panel (moderated  by Rhode Island-based Jon Hammond) in Boston newspapers, and 
about 160 Beantown movers & shakers attended. Photos and a synopsis (if not a 
full transcript) will be posted at Jazzhouse soon as possible. 

The next Jazz Matters program hosted by the JJA's NYC-area chapter will be a 
holiday party, focused on Lourdes Delgado's superb and still growing 
portraiture project, photos of musicians and some other jazz figures in their home 
environs. Musicians and all jazz journalists, members or not, are invited: Wed., 
Dec. 22, 6 to 8 p.m., at the New School Jazz performance space, 5th floor, 55 
W. 13th St., NYC. Refreshments (libations) will be served, and we're looking to 
schmooze. Arnold Jay Smith is scheduled to interview Mark Murphy that night 
at his New School class, too. 

I guess that does it for now. So much to report, and there will be more, 
more, more. But please get me your 10 best lists, get your ideas to appropriate 
directors, volunteer to work to maintain and improve our organization, take a 
look at what JJA members are publishing, photographing, and lend an ear to their 
broadcasts, don't forget to get some jazz journalism done -- and have happy 
holidays, too. 

best, Howard