A Re-ordering of Priorities . . .
I have been fortunate in chronicling jazz events and personalities for this paper and its predecessors over the past 30-plus years. In the past decade, I have profiled more than 110 musicians and jazz advocates who have interesting and reflective stories to tell. Six years ago, I published a book, Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz, that was a compilation of 47 of these profiles, and which is now out of print.
As our world of communications has evolved from print to digital, it occurred to me that there is historical value to these profiles and to the contributions these musicians have made to the jazz community. Additionally, I have long felt that these musicians are deserving of wider recognition and exposure beyond the readership of a single monthly publication with limited circulation.
Amazon, which is becoming all-things-to-all-people, has come up with a process for writers to create both digital and paperback copies of their books and then market them on a worldwide basis. So with the assistance of a friend who is more technically-astute than I, the file of the 2013 book is being reformatted to Kindle Direct Publishing’s specifications and will ultimately produce an eBook and paperback of Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz.
This process has me wading through uncharted waters and has been most time-consuming. I have realized that I have to lighten the load and have informed my intrepid publisher-editor that if a second book is ever to see the light of day, I must take leave of submitting my monthly submissions for the foreseeable future in order to focus on the publication of these two books. Wish me well.
Lew Shaw started writing about music as the publicist for the famous Berkshire Music Barn in the 1960s. He joined the West Coast Rag in 1989 and has been a guiding light to this paper through the two name changes since then as we grew to become The Syncopated Times. 47 of his profiles of today's top musicians are collected in Jazz Beat: Notes on Classic Jazz.Volume two, Jazz Beat Encore: More Notes on Classic Jazz contains 43 more! Lew taps his extensive network of connections and friends throughout the traditional jazz world to bring us his Jazz Jottings column every month.
