The jazz business is in a bad way right now. “The talent level has never been so high. But jazz economics are at a nadir not seen since the late 1960s, when Miles Davis, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra went electric and brought fusion to rock-oriented baby boomers. In this attenuated climate, jazz sales accounted for about 2% of the total market, mostly from back catalogue and new product by singers like Diana Krall and Norah Jones, who helped their labels stay solvent by going platinum.”
Tag: 01.12.03
A Hundred Years Of Buying Art
“A century after it began with 53 members paying one guinea a year each, the National Art Collections Fund, now often known as the Art Fund, is Britain’s leading independent arts charity with 90,000 members paying a minimum of £32 annually. During those 100 years, it has bought or helped to buy 477,384 objects for British museums and art galleries with grants totalling almost £38 million. If past funding is converted into today’s equivalent sums, the NACF has helped public collections to the tune of £84,173,626.”
Are Literary Prizes Wasted On The Young?
Should Granta’s list of best young novelists have used age as a criterion? What, after all, does youth have to do with promise when it comes to writing? “Is it pinpointing the best writers of this year alone, or attempting to predict who will cast a shadow over the literary landscape until the announcement of the next list in 2013?
Married To Competition
Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn are married to one another, but they’re also finalists for a Whitbread Award and competing. “Perhaps the most startling thing the Frayn/Tomalin news has brought to light is the suspicion – or perhaps it’s even a schadenfreudian certainty – that writers must not get on. They are, we seem to imagine, selfish, competitive and vampiric by nature – sucking real life and friendships dry for the sake of fiction.”