FIND ME!

At a jazz gig in New York City or elsewhere, I’m usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt (I favor large blossoms) and I have a videocamera either up to my face or within reach.  There’s a notebook and a pen. Often there’s food near me: video archiving is hungry work; less often, intoxicating beverages.  Yawning and videoing don’t mix.

My email address is swingyoucats@gmail.com.  My friends call me Michael; more formal types call me Mr. Steinman.  If you’re a promoter of “jazz” and you’d like me to review your artist’s new CD or related endeavors, please look at a few posts on this blog, so the effort of contacting me hasn’t been wasted.  And I am serious.  Publicists are doing a job they are paid for, I hope, and I will assume they are serious people, devoted to their art.  But if you are promoting someone “smooth,” someone “genre-bending electronica and house,” we are not a good fit.  Here’s a test.  Who’s Lester Young?  Who’s Louis Armstrong?  Who were the members of the Count Basie rhythm section?  I know that I am leaving out my living heroes who make this music, but I didn’t want to make one friend a test question and hurt someone’s feelings by omission.  And when you write to me, it’s old-fashioned, but I prefer the personal approach rather than “Hey!”

In November 2011, I made the metaphorical leap to Facebook, where I post JAZZ LIVES simultaneously: you can find it or me there at http://www.facebook.com/michael.jazzlives.  (Update: I got seriously hacked or is it spammed or scammed in May 2023, so I am withdrawing from Facebook.  I may be back, but I don’t know.)

And . . . as if all that media display wasn’t enough, the videos I post here also appear on YouTube on the swingyoucats channel.  I am very proud of those videos and the posterity they give great artists, and in 2023 I learned that my videos had gotten 15 million views, which delights me.  I wish I could pay the artists directly, but I can only do so by puting money in the tip jar and buying their CDs.

Welcome!