By Jazz Fans, For Jazz Fans: How All About Jazz Works

When All About Jazz launched in 1995, one of our earliest taglines was simple: "By jazz fans, for jazz fans."

At the time, those six words pretty much said it all.

We were people who loved jazz, writing about jazz for other people who loved jazz. There wasn't much need to explain the organizational philosophy behind it because there wasn't much of an organization yet.

More than thirty years later, All About Jazz has grown into something far more expansive. Our team includes journalists, authors, editors, administrators, technologists, musicians, industry professionals, radio & podcast hosts and visual artists from around the world. Many have decades of experience. Some have written books, liner notes, artist biographies and press releases, contributed to newspapers and magazines, taught professionally, worked within the music industry or built careers around the arts.

They're professionals, but here's the important part. They're still fans.

And that may explain more about how All About Jazz works—and why it has endured—than anything else I could tell you.

I Build the Platform

I've described my role at All About Jazz the same way from the beginning: my job is to build the platform.

That was true in 1995, and it's true today. I've never believed my job was to decide every musician we should cover, every album we should review, every person we should interview or every story we should tell.

My responsibility is to build and continually improve the environment in which talented and knowledgeable people can do those things themselves. That means building the technology, publishing tools, databases, editorial systems and discovery mechanisms that make All About Jazz work. It also means building something less tangible but equally important: a culture in which people understand our standards, earn our trust and are then given room to exercise their own judgment.

Once a contributor understands All About Jazz, demonstrates good judgment and earns that trust, my message is essentially this:

You know jazz. You understand what we're trying to accomplish. Now go find something worth sharing with our readers.
Find the musician who deserves greater attention.
Discover the recording people should hear.
Ask the question nobody else has asked.
Tell the story that deserves to be told.
Help someone discover jazz.

That freedom is important to me because All About Jazz has never been about reflecting one person's taste in music—not mine, nor those of influential editors like John Kelman and Chris May.

The platform works because thousands of knowledgeable people have brought their own interests, experiences, specialties, perspectives and curiosity to it. My job is to give them a place where all of that can become useful.

Professionalism and Volunteerism

There's something about All About Jazz that occasionally causes confusion, so let's put it plainly:

All About Jazz is a professional publishing operation powered by volunteer contributors.

Those two ideas are not contradictory. Volunteer describes how our contributors choose to participate. Professional describes how we operate. Our contributors volunteer their time; they do not abandon their standards.

That distinction has been part of All About Jazz from the beginning.

I've always approached AAJ as a professional operation, and I've expected the people representing it to conduct themselves professionally. We have editorial standards, submission guidelines, publishing procedures and expectations regarding how we interact with musicians, publicists, venues, labels, readers and one another.

At the same time, I've never wanted All About Jazz to feel corporate or overly structured. We're serious about what we do without taking ourselves too seriously. There's room for personality. There's room for humor. There's room to experiment. There's room for individual voices and different ways of approaching the music.

In that sense, perhaps the culture resembles jazz itself.

There's a structure. You need to understand the form. You need to listen to the people around you. And once you've demonstrated that you know what you're doing, there's plenty of room to improvise.

You could describe the philosophy another way:

Low bureaucracy. High standards.

Why Would Professionals Volunteer?

It's a fair question.

Many All About Jazz contributors are professional writers, photographers, musicians, educators and industry people. Some regularly take paid freelance assignments. Their work has value, and contributing to All About Jazz doesn't diminish that value.

So why do they do it? There isn't one answer, but after more than thirty years, I've seen three motivations repeatedly.

First, they're passionate about the music. That's where everything begins. Jazz inspires curiosity. There's always another musician to discover, another recording to hear, another connection to make and another story to tell. All About Jazz gives people who possess that curiosity a place to act on it.

Second, they want to reach an audience. Writers want to be read. Photographers want their work to be seen. Radio & Podcast Hosts want to be heard. People with knowledge want an opportunity to share it. We've spent more than three decades building an audience and a platform capable of connecting their work with jazz listeners around the world. That matters.

Third, contributors can benefit professionally from their association with All About Jazz. I don't shy away from that. In fact, I encourage it.

Over the years, contributors have used their All About Jazz affiliation and body of work to establish relationships, gain access, increase their visibility and open doors to opportunities that might otherwise have remained closed.

If writing for All About Jazz helps someone land a liner-note assignment, make an important industry connection, gain access to an artist, establish credibility, find freelance work or advance another professional goal, that's a good thing. This is how a healthy ecosystem should work:

All About Jazz benefits from the contributor's knowledge and work.
The contributor benefits from the platform, audience, credibility and opportunities associated with All About Jazz.
Musicians benefit from thoughtful coverage and greater visibility.
Readers discover music.
Everyone contributes something. Everyone gets something back.
It doesn't have to be the same thing.

The Unwritten Contract

For most of our history, none of this was formally articulated. People joined All About Jazz, learned how we operated, worked with our editors, became familiar with our publishing tools and gradually absorbed the culture. In other words, there was an unwritten social contract.

I've always understood my side of it—I build and maintain the platform.

All About Jazz provides the publishing infrastructure, editorial support, audience, visibility, community and opportunities that come with being part of an established international jazz publication.

The contributor brings knowledge, judgment, ideas, time, curiosity, an individual voice and a commitment to professional standards.

Then something important happens—Trust develops.

As that trust grows, so does independence.

I don't want editors spending their time performing administrative tasks that contributors can handle themselves. I don't want writers waiting for someone to tell them what they should be interested in. And I certainly don't want every editorial decision running through me.

I want capable people to become increasingly self-sufficient. With that independence comes responsibility.

If we trust you to represent All About Jazz, respect that trust.

If we give you access, use it professionally.

If we've built tools to help you publish your work, learn how to use them.

If an editor gives you guidance, listen.

If you make a commitment, honor it.

And if All About Jazz helps you advance your own goals along the way, terrific—that's the agreement.

It has largely remained unwritten for more than thirty years—perhaps it's time we wrote it down.

It Was Never About Me

I've been fortunate to earn the respect of the people I've worked with over the years, and I know many of them are pulling for All About Jazz—and for me—to succeed. I'm grateful for that, but people don't spend years writing about jazz because of Michael Ricci, nor should they.

It's always been about jazz.

My role has been to create a place where someone's passion, knowledge and curiosity can reach beyond themselves. That's the real power of a platform.

One writer may develop a deep interest in an overlooked musician. Another may specialize in a particular country, instrument, style or period. Someone else may become fascinated with emerging artists. Another contributor may have spent decades developing relationships and knowledge that allow them to tell stories few others could tell.

I don't need all of those people to share my interests—I need them to understand All About Jazz, exercise good judgment and care about the music.

I didn't need people to believe in me—I need them to believe in what we were building.

And then I needed to trust them to help build it.

Freedom Within a Framework

That balance between freedom and structure is another reason I believe All About Jazz has endured.

We don't ask contributors to surrender their individual voices. Quite the opposite. The range of personalities, interests, experiences and perspectives represented by our contributors has always been one of AAJ's strengths.

But individual voices exist within a shared editorial framework—that's an important distinction.

Freedom without standards eventually becomes chaos.

Standards without freedom eventually become bureaucracy.

We've tried to occupy the space between the two.

Learn the system.

Understand the standards.

Respect your colleagues.

Take responsibility for your work.

Then bring us something interesting.

That's the AAJ Way.

Something Larger Than Any of Us

There is one more piece of the model, and it may be the most important.

All About Jazz exists to serve something much larger than All About Jazz—we exist to serve Jazz.

The music was here before us, and it will be here after us. Our job is to document it, celebrate it, question it, preserve its stories, connect the people who participate in it and, above all, help people discover it.

That shared purpose allows a remarkably diverse group of people to work together.

We don't all like the same jazz.

We don't all approach writing the same way.

We don't have identical professional ambitions.

We don't live in the same countries, come from the same backgrounds or participate for exactly the same reasons.

We don't need to.

The common denominator is the music.

That's enough.

By Jazz Fans, For Jazz Fans

More than thirty years ago, we described All About Jazz with six simple words:

By jazz fans, for jazz fans.

A lot has changed since then. Those fans are now journalists, authors, editors, administrators, technologists, photographers, musicians, educators and industry professionals.

We're more experienced.

The platform is more sophisticated.

Our reach is greater.

Our standards are higher.

And All About Jazz has become something I couldn't possibly have built alone.

But we're still fans. We still get excited when we discover an extraordinary musician we've never heard before.

We still want to tell somebody else about a great record.

We still believe deserving artists should be heard.

We still believe jazz has stories worth telling.

And we still believe that bringing knowledgeable people together and giving them the tools, freedom and audience to share their enthusiasm can help the music reach more people.

Maybe "By jazz fans, for jazz fans" wasn't something we outgrew after all—maybe it was the model all along.