Jim Trageser

Since: 2015 | Position: Contributor | Location: San Diego | Page Views: 70,215

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About Me

I am a San Diego-based music journalist, mostly covering jazz and blues.

Over the years, I've written for publications ranging from the San Diego Evening Tribune to Loud 'N' Clear (a heavy metal magazine). I was the longtime San Diego-area theater and opera critic for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, I wrote a nationally syndicated column about online culture for Copley News Service, and covered San Diego's local music scene for the North County Times and, until recently, San Diego Troubadour. In between these gigs I was a news reporter covering city hall, crime and schools for several local newspapers; I taught an upper-division journalism course at Point Loma Nazarene University; and was even the voice of SDSU Aztecs baseball one season for the campus radio station. I contributed to "The Grove Guide to Blues on CD," "Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" and "With One Eye Open." Currently, in addition to AllAboutJazz I also write for Living Blues magazine, and am working on a history of jazz in San Diego.

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My Jazz Story

I was first exposed to jazz when my mom gave me and my buddy Don tickets to the San Diego Zoo's Summer Big Band Series in 1983. Count Basie was set to perform. I had zero interest, but Mom said, "Someday you'll tell your grandchildren you saw the great Count Basie" - and my buddy grabbed the tickets out of her hand, as his dad was drummer for the San Diego Navy Show Band and he loved jazz. I'd never seen anything like that show - 18 men hitting a note as one, playing with a looseness, swing and joy no Marshall stack of amps could ever replicate. We stopped at Tower Records on the way home after the show, and I bought about 10 Basie albums, from reissues of his 1930s sides to his then-new Pablo stuff.