JazzTimes editor Lee Mergner responds to the PREX critique of Downbeat and JazzTimes:Objectively, I believe he's overreacted to our cover choices, including most recently Return to Forever, Esperanza Spalding, Freddie Hubbard and David Sanborn. I'm not sure why he dropped the cover artist Rahsaan Roland Kirk; I suppose it didn't fit his argument. Apparently, picking what we deem as the most commercial and accessible story for the cover makes me a corporate suit and the magazine a tool of publicity flacks. Besides the fact that these cover subjects are pretty damn worthy as artists, if you look at the depth and breadth of coverage in those issues, you see that we are serving the music and our readership quite well. Clearly, he doesn’t dig Sanborn and his heartfelt tribute to Hank Crawford and David Fathead Newman, but in that same issue were features or stories on Ari Hoenig, Bill Stewart, Corey Wilkes, Billy Cobham, Chico Hamilton, Alvin Queen, Tim Warfield, John McLaughlin and Chick Corea. The issue had a drum theme, as you might guess from that list, but in any case, that list is a nice representative sampling of the music - past, present and future. Also, if he had spoken directly with the jazz publicity folks, he’d find that their suggestions and pitches are rejected at an uncomfortably high rate, for various reasons including space and relevance. For the record, we solicited the cover stories on each of those artists. And in fact the piece on Spalding was about the machinery of hype. Finally, if we did these covers for advertising, as is commonly charged, then we really messed up because you won’t see many ads for releases from those artists.
