Now, Howard Mandel is not a musician. But he is one of the most prominent historians of this music, and as such, I have been a long admirer of his work, which in its own right deserves accolades. As president of the Jazz Journalists Association, he has championed the voice of journalists who document the progress of this art form. So it was my personal honor to get an opportunity to speak with, perhaps, one of a handful of writers that I respect, and we did just that, from his office in New York. We sat down for a candid conversation about this music and his new book "Future Jazz." I was taken aback by his humility and tangibility. This is one of jazz's heaviest voice, unedited and in his own words.

FJ: What made you want to write about this music?

HM: I was a kid who was very curious about all sorts of expression. I was a bookworm and I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a child, five, six years old, story telling and relating to stories told in words. Music became such a fascinating topic for me, the music being made by people who were strange to me, but lived in my same community, maybe just across the street. Black musicians from Hyde Park, where I was living in Southshore, another adjacent community in Chicago. As I grew into my teens, and I was struggling with writing, this just became a topic that drew me to it. I would spend time listening to music on records. Records that I bought from discount bins, ESP records, Cecil Taylor records, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis records. I found Sun Ra. I would write while I was listening. I found that to be an incredible experience and I've kept doing that throughout my entire career, so even today I write record reviews.

FJ: As a historian, what were the pivotal times of this music?

HM: The nascent part of the creation of jazz, when all the elements seemed to come together along with business elements that made it possible to disseminate what was sort of a burgeoning folk music, to disseminate it as a commodity in the twenties and in the thirties as radio took hold, recordings become more available, and travel, physical travel. Trains made it possible to cross this country and for musicians to appear in many different places. I think this is a very pivotal time for jazz in this country. And of course, World War II made it quite difficult. There was a suspension of activity then, suppression of activity. We had a big change after the war, so in the late '50s, jazz began to gain momentum again, gain power, consolidate as a cultural force. The bebop ideas got really wide spread. The innovators went on to expand from there. People like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, all arose during that time, challenging what had happened before, Miles Davis also was making changes as to what music might be. I think that from '58, '59 through early nineteen-seventies, there was an explosion of ideas and individuals, who had incredible talent and were able to find ways to support themselves in the jazz community. I guess that's the second period that I would point to. I think we've been living in a fairly high level of jazz prosperity since 1982, '83, when CDs came on the scene for the first time. So we've been living in a different kind of jazz economy for the last seventeen, eighteen years. I don't know if it's been good for individuals in jazz. It's been mediocre for jazz as a whole cultural enterprise. I think jazz as a symbolism is very accepted in mainstream media, in advertising, in television, in soundtracks, but I don't think that there is much focus on what the art really is, who people are, and what kind of rewards they deserve for their accomplishments. I don't know if this is a real golden age or a pivotal age right now. Of course, the time that we're living in right now is most pivotal to us, I've got to say. What we're doing right now, in the present. Jazz pushes that idea, big time.

FJ: Condense your book "Future Jazz" into a cliff notes version that would fit on the back of a postcard.

HM: I've been telling people that it's the AACM to Zorn, with Wynton Marsalis smack dab in the middle. I've written here about music from the last twenty-five years that I think is going to have impact for the next twenty-five years or further and it's impact just to keep things changing.

FJ: You have a couple of chapters devoted to Wynton Marsalis, how has Marsalis impacted this music?

HM: I think that he's really been able to legitimize jazz in a way since musicians have been trying to since Paul Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin to write "Rhapsody in Blue," to make jazz a lady. Wynton has definitely brought jazz into the opera house, into Lincoln Center. He's shown a way for Lincoln Center and other performance institutions like it to draw together a well healed audience, a culturally aware audience, and to create works that are large enough to engage these cultural institutions. I heard Wynton's ballet a couple of weeks ago, his jazz ballet, his collaborations with Peter Martins and they were stunning. They were great. I think that Wynton's done some incredible work that way. I think that he's also a fine technician, which is proved by his recreations of both jazz and classical works. He's interpretations, a stunning technician and he's justified jazz to people who otherwise kind of dismiss it. What that does for the jazz fan, who already loves the music and is well grounded in it, I don't think it's quite as much more for the purists, or aficionados, or people who don't have to be converted already. I think that's where Wynton's work has peaked so far, in classical kinds of collaboration, also quite good with soundtrack music, kind of formal settings.

FJ: You also touch on klezmer music, what do you think will be its impact on jazz?

HM: It will be the same way fusing Afro-Cuban music with jazz or Middle Eastern music with jazz or Asian elements, like the Asian improvisers are doing in Chicago, in San Francisco, and here in New York. Klezmer and middle European Jewish music, which actually became American music, Jewish-American music and the stuff that was played in New York for their own weddings. They didn't play this in Romania, where they were coming from necessarily, in the '20s. They arrived in New York in a jazz age and they were adapting Jewish themes to the instrumentation that they heard around them in the jazz age. So this music is very jazzy and actually grows up at the same time as jazz. It's got a long history of development and parallel. It's a minor subset I would say or a small subset of jazz and it has been all these years. Now the Knitting Factory musicians working with klezmer materials, because these musicians are so prominent and so aggressive about getting their ideas out, I think that klezmer is going to be considered just a regular source to draw on similar to old blues songs or folk music melodies that we know well.

FJ: Dave Douglas is a player advancing klezmer with John Zorn's Masada.

HM: Dave Douglas is another fine technician, a very broad and thinking musician. I don't think of him as somebody who is doing a lot in the radical Jewish jazz area. I guess his playing with Masada is such good improvisation and hard blowing, that's where I love to listen to him most. He's a good composer and producer of beautiful musical projects too. I haven't absorbed all the things that he's done. I don't think of him, first and foremost, as a klezmer musician, I must say.

FJ: What do you feel has been the Knitting Factory's contribution to the promotion and presentation of this music?

HM: The Knitting Factory has been a great venue for musicians to struggle to get their work out. It's provided a stage, sometimes six or eight stages a night, and having a place that is so accessible. I can't say that the Knitting Factory is paradise, but it's good fun to hang out there and I think it's hard work to play there. I think it's rewarding. It's been a big stage for people and it has been now for more than ten years. It hasn't lost its enthusiasm for new music or its eagerness to put on music at ever-higher levels, higher profile levels.

FJ: KnitMedia put on the Bell Atlantic, earlier this month, how have you seen the festivals grow and the overall presentation improve over the last quarter of this century?

HM: A few decades ago, there was no corporate sponsorship at this kind of level of Bell Atlantic or Texaco or JVC, that funds the New York Jazz Festival and Newport Jazz Festival. That just didn't exist two decades ago and that's something that started in the late '70s and began with philanthropic foundations, non-profit foundations like the National Endowment of the Arts. That national arts funding, eventually turned into some states arts funding also. That was a very important financial source for jazz activities, jazz musicians because there were fellowship grants given, until during the Reagan years that funding got totally cut. When that happened, some of the corporations could be swayed to lend their money to these kinds of efforts. I'm thinking about Phillip Morris, who particularly did a lot of funding at that time and still continues to somewhat. I think that laid the way for big corporations like Bell Atlantic or Texaco to decide that jazz is a good spokesperson, a good spokescharacterist, a good spokesactivity, a good funding activity. Jazz brings people together. Jazz gives you a good feeling. Jazz suggests innovation and engagement and forward motion. This is the image that these corporations want to be identified with, so they get behind it. I think that's really changed. What's changed overall in jazz, over the whole century, is that it used to be funded, completely, as a commercial enterprise, now today, it's understood, at least in part, that it's an art form that deserves corporate support and state support, a la Lincoln Center. That's changed to an extent, but jazz itself remains a frankly commercial enterprise, something that people play and they want it to be popular. They don't want it to be elite or unavailable or only for people who can play huge sums. Jazz has its honesty that way. It ends up being a democratic music, a populist music. It is an art form of the people.

FJ: Having traveled throughout the country, how is the New York downtown scene exceptional to that of other metropolitan hubs?

HM: In New York downtown, there's just more concentration of energy and people you are bouncing off all the time. You can go out and hear music in downtown New York City everyday. Hear three bands. Start at nine at night and come in at two in the morning every night and hear something interesting. I don't do that anymore every night (laughing). I'd burn out to some extent, but it's certainly possible. People come here to test their metal. They really strive to make it. It's very competitive.

FJ: The old adage in the ad business is, "you make it in New York, you make it anywhere," would you say the same applies in reference to the music?

HM: I think making it in New York may be just parachuting in, having connections with just the right people, and getting your work out, and then hopping the next plane to wherever it is that makes your heart glad and lets your music come into you. I can imagine that people do it that way. For me, I think this is where the action is. I love to hear it all, but some musicians may like solitude.

FJ: Define avant-garde, free, and out, and is there a difference between the three?

HM: If we're just talking labels and adjectives, the way they're thrown around in the jazz press, I would say the three words are almost interchangeable. Avant-garde refers to a music that came up in the 1960s and was considered a breakaway from jazz as it had been made. It was this idea that people were going to push forward with jazz and that they were a vanguard group going out to explore new ideas. That they would land in some whole new area, destination. They were the avant-garde and they were probing in that way. A lot of elements of musicians in the avant-garde in the '60s still exists in jazz today. They are only really shocking to us when they take us out, when they lift us off. I think that any kind of music can be out, that it's unusual and can be out of the box, out of the convention, and out of the frame of reference that he's got, right there, while you're sitting and watching this particular band. All of the sudden, one musician emerges with an idea that lifts the music to a different level. That's out. He's playing out. It doesn't necessarily have to be extreme or extended technique, but it can still be out in a way. The other term was free. That's a difficult world regarding jazz. Free to use everything you know. Free to know a lot. Free to be willing to investigate all possibilities. Free to be curious and not limited by your habits. I think that that is what free jazz is about, the best.

FJ: I heard something very interesting from a musician, who expressed to me how he thought that there was no innovation on the guitar in jazz like that of John Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Miles Davis, trumpet, and Thelonious Monk, piano. Do you find that is an accurate assessment, as a historian of this music?

HM: I thought Jimi Hendrix was pretty innovative. People right now, I found Blood Ulmer is quite innovative, in kind of, going back to the very essence of what guitar playing could be. There's something very primitive that he drives back for and finds. Innovative, Jim Hall is a superbly innovative guitarist, in being able to stretch long melodic movements through a lot of different kinds of guitar playing, not just single note, not just chordal. I don't know how much he does that on record, but I've heard him do it live. Those are three that come to mind. I think Bill Frisell is an innovative player too, working with the electronic processing when he was really free improvising. I found him to be very intuitively innovative.

FJ: The term "young lion", do you find that term applies anymore because I know it offends many young musicians?

HM: It's a term I use in "Future Jazz" because it was very prevalent during the '80s. It referred to a bunch of guys who were ready to bare their teeth and take a big chunk out of the apple and go for the jazz prizes, claim themselves as the up and coming generation and they were going to make a roar out of it. That's who the young lions were. Somehow they've matured and mellowed, not always fulfilling their potential yet. They're kind of the aging lions now or the mellow lions or the nearly forty lions or something along these lines. So I don't use that term much anymore.

FJ: As the president of the Jazz Journalists Association, what are the responsibilities of the writers, critics, journalists, and historians of this music?

HM: We should do the best job we can and document what is going on right now. I think we should exercise a lot of energy into understanding what's come just before us and in getting some information out to a larger public about what great music jazz is and how it really can help us. It gives us some ideas. It makes us feel better a lot of the time, but it also can be very stimulating and provocative as a way of ordering activity. Look what musicians have been able to do with scraps of imagination to put together things that are as complex as big bands. If we apply that kind of collaborative effort to local government, I always think that there is something very useful about the way jazz operates. I don't know if it's the responsibility of all jazz critics to tell that to their Congress people, but I think just getting the word out in general that this music is not just a pastime, we're talking about something that's very inventive here. I think that that's a responsibility that I wish people would shoot for.

FJ: Since the JJA inception, it has collaborated with KnitMedta to host the New York Jazz Awards, does jazz need more award show of that prominence?

HM: I don't know if it needs more of them, I think it needs a couple of them to bring the music to the public eye. This is the way that the public is alerted about cultural activity in this day and age, through award shows that get publicized on TV. This is an entertainment medium and we've got to deal with it now if we're going to be a music that has finances on the order of country music or rhythm and blues music. Those genres of music now have commercial enterprises that give out awards and make a big thing about what they are doing and we've got to do that. It's just the reality of the commercial situation at this time. I'm happy to participate in the awards. I think we're trying to devise a way of honoring, of celebrating people's accomplishments, letting the world know that there are some really special musicians out there that have done some really great work during the year, also the journalists themselves, their accomplishments are recognized. We have a separate Jazz Journalists Association Awards that are given at the same time for accomplishments in jazz journalism and writing and broadcasting, lifetime achievement, so we're happy to recognize those things that have happened this year and try to bring everybody else's attention to it. I think the musicians love it and deserving so because nobody gets them together and tells them, "You guys all did great. Nominees or winners, you did great. We just want to spread the word. We want to call your names and celebrate your names and we want to do that on TV if we can." I'm very happy to participate in this. I think it's fun. It's not the most serious thing in the world. You're still going to have a personal preference of one player over another, maybe that's not the player that won the award that you preferred, but who cares about that. We're celebrating everybody by doing this sort of thing.

FJ: On that note, congratulations on your nomination.

HM: Oh, thank you. I like to be nominated, but it's a little embarrassing also. I do not want to give myself a reward.

FJ: Having been a former editor for Downbeat, give me your five desert island picks.

HM: There's so much music to hear. Right now, I think about "Tone Dialing," Ornette Coleman's because I haven't absorbed it all. I think there's a lot there to listen to and I like that. I would almost have to take "Kind of Blue." Of all the records in jazz, it's one that, just is so indelible and every time I listen to it, it still gives me a lot. I love that. I can think of five other Miles records I would bring also, but I won't let that happen. Let's see, what else, Betty Carter, "Inside Betty Carter." She is at her very best. It's the early '60s, '64, she sings a great version of "My Favorite Things," with a nod to Coltrane and in about a minute and thirty-four seconds. It's got a dynamite note and it's a great album. I would bring "Symphony for Improvisers," Don Cherry's album with Gato Barbieri, Pharoah Sanders, Ed Blackwell, that's a suite, two twenty-five minute suites and it's so merry and melodic and it's got so many ideas bouncing around in it, I would love to have that. And then maybe an Art Ensemble record. I really think of "Numbers 1 & 2," which is maybe an obscure one. It was on Nessa Records and it was the Art Ensemble just as a trio, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Lester Bowie. If I can only have five.

FJ: To give our readers a little perspective, exactly how many CDs are mailed to you by record companies a year?

HM: Last year, I got 2,200 CDs for free.

FJ: Out of that 2,200, how many did you end up reviewing?

HM: Maybe a dozen. Well, it's been a little bit more this year, actually. This year, I've written about three dozen record reviews so far.

FJ: And how many calls do you get from the various record companies, publicists, or artists in regards to their CDs?

HM: Not as many as you might think. I would say maybe a dozen a week. I feel like I get about ten records a day, it usually feels like. Sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less. It seems to be almost the average. They just pour in. The people aren't always on the phone hassling me about hearing things. And when they do, I don't mind. They have a lot at steak here. It's my job to listen to music. It's what I'm supposed to be doing. It's what I like to do. I understand why they're asking me to hear it. I can't hear everything though and I don't hear everything and I don't sit and listen to things over and over again, trying to get it. If I don't get it, if I don't like it necessarily, if I don't think that there's something there to be got, so my listening is more selective then that.

FJ: For the benefit of musicians and publicists, is there a difference between a journalist and critic?

HM: I'd say so. There's a difference between journalism and criticism, although one person my fulfill both those functions. It's a lot of reportage involved in journalism. We have to really be responsible about the who, what, where, when, why. A good journalist is covering a beat and understands what that beat is. If they are a freelancer, like I am, you make certain definitions for yourself. You try to be up to date. Critics can be more removed then that. I don't advise it. I think criticism should engage with the reality of the creative situation all together. Why this musician is doing this includes what they're bills amount to. But you can be more abstracted from day to day life than that in criticism and just deal with some level of aesthetic concerns that you think is interesting I suppose.

FJ: Since we are talking about "Future Jazz," kindly let our readers know who you think has the potential to be great in the future?

HM: I think there are people who are great right now. I think Myra Melford, who is an old friend of mine, is doing just some great music right now. I think her music is very appealing and will be heard more broadly. Dave Douglas has worked with her, Erik Friedlander. She's also worked with Joseph Jarman and Leroy Jenkins, so she's rather broad. She's a pianist and a composer, one I think people should be aware of. I think James Newton still has quite a lot of music to play and I would urge people not to loose track of him. He's a fantastic flutist.

FJ: Since we are talking about your book "Future Jazz," what do you see as the future for jazz?

HM: The future of jazz is really broad to me. I would include everything in jazz. Jazz has its structures and its strategies imbedded in it. It's an art form to be able to absorb all sorts of different elements and to make a really significant statement with those elements. Let individuals participate in creating these statements collectively. Let individuals express themselves personally. I think jazz is able to do that whether you're using vocabulary from Black American blues tradition or from the klezmer tradition or from Latin dance music or from Asia or anywhere. You can begin to work rhythmically. You can begin to think about call and response. You can find correspondences amongst different players who are improvising motifs or with freer ideas. I think jazz offers us lots of models for that kind of activity. I think that that's a very useful kind of activity that we create things in during this time in our culture. Jazz has the same potential as the future does in general. It can really grow. It can really be explosive. It's so much easier to be in contact with people from all the different places and to take that contact we have and to incorporate that into our own thinking through jazz practices and processes. I think we're going to be hearing music from all over the world. It's so clear. It's so positive and encouraging in a way to organize sound and to organize creative work together.