Bill Shoemaker

The jazz critics love a horse race, especially when they help create it. The late 1950s saw what is arguably their greatest fabrication. Trumpeter Miles Davis, with his high-profile contract with Columbia Records (not to mention his impeccable style in clothing and Ferarris), was already a star, and the jazz press was on the lookout […]

Jazz rode the 1990s surprisingly well. It was a decade in which the recorded-music market was flat compared to other media; and traditionally, jazz–which has a perennial single-digit market share–is an early casualty of the budget cuts and corporate take-overs that market slumps spawn. But that didn’t happen in the 1990s. Moreover, jazz benefited from […]

I n all probability, it was just a coincidence that in July the House of Representatives voted to repeal some of the more draconian aspects of the economic embargo against Cuba the day after PBS aired Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders’s Oscar-nominated documentary film about an instantly lovable aggregation of Cuban crooners and virtuoso […]