Contents

Do you know what it means ?

Dear friends,
Jazz Hot is preparing for a new phase in its long life. This means we will be suspending publication to think about an enduring and quality future. We are not talking about covering wrinkles with make-up; this is about enriching our content and sizing up the possibilities offered by the new world around us, considering all - economy, technology and media..
First of all, I want to address the subscribers who will be immediately reimbursed for all the issues that were to be included in their present subscriptions. This way each one of you will be free to join us again, on a new adventure, having received our gift CD, in some cases for a single issue only, our thanks to you for your loyalty.
This parenthesis in the life of Jazz Hot, and it is not the first, allows us to reflect deeply, in the face of a fast changing world, on the available avenues toward preserving a rare and fundamental value of the press ‚ independence. This was Charles Delaunay’s wish and it remains ours.
The last 17 years spent in your company have been fruitful and happy. We have, in particular, been able to maintain our standing as an international and independent magazine anchored firmly in the culture of jazz. Its small editorial structure has enabled Jazz Hot to become one of the best and most beautiful reviews of jazz worldwide. We hear this from people who cannot be suspected of pandering to us. They come from various countries, all walks of life and social milieu. Some are just learning about jazz; others are full-fledged specialists. Some even belong to competing magazines! Others are named McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Wynton Marsalis, Mighty Mo Rodgers, Kenny Barron, Ted Curson and still others may be not as well known. Their words have always been a precious and valuable support.
Readers, artists and jazz professionals have contributed to the life of Jazz Hot since 1991, through editorial content or economic support and have respected our independence. We are deeply appreciative of that. After difficulties in the 1980’s, with the death of Charles Delauney, Jazz Hot was able at the turn of the century, to re-gain it’s firm standing and re-establish its international reputation for professionalism and richness of content, and to re-create a network of valuable partners. We have thus been able to express a unique vision of jazz culture, promoted out of passion and never demanding servility.
Jazz Hot is anchored in the fundamentals of jazz, a music powered by its own history, which is the spirit and substance of its creativity. The choice to assign priority to the words of the musicians at the heart of jazz, and to their stories in particular, was the way to return the human essence to the center of the cultural debate, to take it out of the cliques, away from a more or less intellectual consumerism and to distinguish it from these counterfeit institutions. In realizing these dimensions, Jazz Hot is indespensible to jazz.
In those 17 years, our writers, photographers, administrators, and managers worked with perseverance, and in good spirit as a solid team . Since ‚ " nobody’s perfect ", there have been two infamous exceptions but all the more reason to respect and appreciate the other members’ good vibes. The team has been a very open one- thanks to the international character of the contributors, both erudite and artistic in their expression, and the magazine has featured in particular, an original layout with pictures from all over the world testifying to the vibrancy of jazz on the planet.
The team has remained modest, in the spirit of jazz. They have respected their perimeters as media professionals, journalists who witness and pass on their testimony. They have not forgotten that jazz is the heart of our passion, and not the pretext for our egos; that it is the artists who ultimately write history, and not the writers, though their sensibilities are accurate and essential.
To exist as an independent magazine in a country where concentration of the press is so overwhelming, even in the field of jazz, is a genuine challenge. But it is possible with conviction and courage as the years have shown. Jazz Hot is, in this regard, a cultural exception, and so, the value of expression means something. Our team is free to innovate and to grow, along technical lines as well as those of content, while preserving, in a history as unconventional as that of jazz, the balance between memory and modernity. It is the essence of jazz as well, to renew itself by virtue of the power of its roots.
We have chosen this moment because the climate is right and our footing is solid, to give Jazz Hot the time, in a window of serenity, to investigate new angles and to revamp for the future. Meanwhile, in this contemplative period, where already new ideas and energies are simmering, our website will keep you up to date. The archives amount to almost 700 issues (some of you may have a little catching-up to do), including 177 excellent issues that I have had the pleasure of producing for you with the assistance of a team, artists, professionals and readers, whom I thank.
My conclusion relates of course to jazz, an exceptional art by virtue of its musical, aesthetic, moral, and philosophical lessons. It is the beautiful, humanistic response, collective and individual, of a non-European population to the deprivation of visibility by three centuries of slavery; it is more largely the history of a country, the United States, where the idea of democracy was realized - and jazz is one proof among many others ‚ a country which did not invent this slavery contrary to the belief of those who are ignorant about history, but which set out, right from the start, to eradicate it- it is a country which has found, in particular in jazz, American art par excellence, ways to resolve, though not without suffering and resistance, an antagonism still active today.
Jazz was not born anywhere else, though the very same people, of the same origin, suffered the same condition of human indignity in other countries. Without the particular alchemy existing between the afro-American population and this country as a whole, while other populations of both European immigrants and indigenous peoples, also awaitied the opportunities promised by a new and free country, without the popular philosophy in action which determined the history of the United States and which is voiced in a majority of interviews, without the ebullient artistic atmosphere of freedom at the beginning of the XXe century within the United States, there would be no jazz!
This point is paradoxical only to those, still too numerous, who consuming jazz at the most superficial level, thrive on anti-American slogans, though their most basic needs for security and food have been met by the US which has sustained them culturally as well. These are the elements that make up the very basis of my reflection and work for Jazz Hot. It is impossible to approach an art form without a true understanding of the civilization from which it stems. France shares a great deal with this history, a social and democratic revolution, and owes to it as much as it brings to it, in jazz, the magnificent outgrowth of music stemming from Django Reinhardt, still alive and kicking, and several beautiful decades of great jazz since 1935, the year when Jazz Hot was born.
These are the ideas at the heart of what jazz has been able to communicate with the rest of the planet. Jazz artists make up a beautiful reservoir of generous emotion that nourishes with humility and spontaneity. They are the future of jazz, an art of proximity. The perspectives that open up for Jazz Hot in the future are more passionate than ever.
Keep swingin’!

Yves Sportis