Even when writing about a topic as delightful and congenial as early jazz, it's quite impossible to avoid controversy. To be fair, just about everyone has offered kind support and encouragement regarding the quality and direction of this new paper. But there are soreheads (mostly non-renewing subscribers who have received more copies than they were entitled to) who have voiced crude remarks when they felt their particularly austere definition of traditional jazz was thrown out with the bathwater of The American Rag.
Well, there was one guy. My feeling is that others share his orthodoxy, though they may not have imbibed enough “truth serum” to tell the editor of The Syncopated Times just how he's gone wrong.
This publication does have a website, the main purpose of which is to host a PayPal button for subscribers. I rarely post other content there, except to announce the publication of a new issue and to offer pertinent information. The template of the site is a free blog, and there was a comment section which I have now closed.
I shut down the site comments because I will not brook drive-by rudeness. On July 8, I received an email alerting me that the following comment had been posted: “What a total croc of [expletive deleted]. Syncopate Times has NO traditional jazz. What is traditional jazz?” The commenter then linked to his own blog post defining The One True Tradi
