Regarding an e-mail from “the Collective for Honesty in the Music Business”:

Many people know who XXX is, and many people know that I was their ripped-off client.

Here’s what happened:

I hired XXX in June 1998 to do publicist work for my upcoming release,"Announcement". To make it brief, XXX did a terrible work; no reviews, no nothing. So, I contacted a media + business-rights + environment freak in Sweden (Bjørn), and he suggested that I do an e-mailing about XXX's fraudulent business. I was against it in January. I wouldn't be able to make a general statement that XXX is a bad company, but I wanted contemporary jazz artists to know that I had a bad experience. Bjørn offered me to do the writing. I was still hesitating because I didn't want to create counter-effects (exactly what happened).

When things, however, really derailed with XXX in March -- even on the personal level -- I told Bjørn to go ahead with whatever his experience thought was the best. So he wrote an anonymous letter without my consent to half of my mailing list (I gave him 100 U.S. e-addresses) and some of his, and it understandably created an unbelievable noise among certain New York people in the jazz business... the fact that it was anonymous generated more attention than the fact that XXX actually ripped me off. Now, there have been some rumors going around that I wrote this letter... I just want to clarify -- this is NOT true, and I don’t even support everything written in it, and certainly not the fact that my and Bjørn's name doesn’t appear.

I got furious with Bjørn about this e-mail; he had originally promised to send a copy to me of his final draft, which he didn’t do. After this e-mail, he has put me in a really difficult position... and the fact that he didn't mention any names (except XXX), made all blame come on me! Why he kept his own identity hidden (which is very unusual of him), I don't know to this day in spite of many enquiries in early April.

I hope you those who received this e-mail, and knew that I was involved with XXX, understand how embarrassed I feel about Bjørn’s unethical actions. I have always tried to stay as far away as possible from that kind of bad business (goodness, aren't we musicians first?!), so I thought I better just not comment this e-mail at all. But when a jazz magazine editor (who I have the priviledge to regard as my friend) sent me an e-mail where he thought that I was “the collective”, I had to react.

Had I known the contents of this infamous e-mail, and especially the consequences before late March, I wouldn't have contacted Bjørn Andersen at all.

Thanks for sharing this information with people who may be wondering how all this happened, and especially who is and is not behind it.

Music first,
Mika Pohjola

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