Get Out and Do Something! The Past, Present, and Future of Event Listings

JJA Board Member Andrew Gilbert hosts a discussion with Steve Smith (Substack “Night After Night,” former Time Out New York music editor) and Chrys Roney (editor in chief and publisher of Hot House Jazz Magazine) about the past, present, and future of jazz listings. 

Inspired by Gabriel Kahane’s Atlantic essay “A Love Letter to Music Listings,” they recall how outlets like the Village Voice, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York once provided expansive calendars that helped audiences discover scenes, neighborhoods, and emerging artists. They describe the decline of print and mainstream media listings, the labor-intensive nature of curating accurate calendars, and how even insiders still miss shows. 

The conversation contrasts journalistic authority and “crit picks” with transaction-driven event discovery platforms, discusses the need for trusted curators to sift through thousands of gigs, and explores evolving models such as nonprofit-supported listings, presenter-fed CMS tools, Instagram-based calendars, micro-subscriptions, and Hot House’s efforts to preserve its 45-year archive and develop a beta “JazzGPT” product.

Explore:

• A Love Letter to Music Listings (paywalled)
• Andrew Gilbert
• Hot House Jazz
• Steve Smith's Night After Night

A special 'thank you' to Terri Hinte for her help in making this episode happen. 

Support for The JJA comes in part from the Jazz Foundation of America, providing emergency assistance, healthcare, and performance opportunities to performers, composers and others in need; Connecting jazz, blues, and roots musicians facing crisis with housing support, pro bono medical care, and paid work through nearly 750 community concerts across 17 states. Saving blues, jazz, and roots one musician at a time. jazzfoundation.org.

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. 

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Andrew Gilbert: Hello, and welcome to The Buzz, the podcast of the Jazz Journalist Association. We’re an international professional organization of writers, photographers, and broadcasters who focus on jazz. I’m Andrew Gilbert, a board member of the JJA and your host for today’s conversation about the glorious past, precarious present, and uncertain future of jazz listings.

I’m joined by Steve Smith, who provides weekly listings on his Substack newsletter Night After Night, and was the dean of the art form as music editor of Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. We’ve also got Chrys Roney, editor in chief of Hot House Jazz Magazine, a New York publication and beyond that offers a ray of hope on the denuded music listing landscape.

Welcome to you both.

Steve Smith: Thank you.

Chrys Roney: Thank you.

Andrew Gilbert: Part of the inspiration for this conversation was a story in The Atlantic last July by composer and singer Gabriel Kahane titled “A Love Letter to Music Listings.” He talks about having an unexpected free night in New York City in 2003, and the many options available for finding interesting music. The New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Out New York, the Village Voice—those once bountiful listings are all basically gone. So before we talk about the situation today, let’s take a minute to remember the role music listings played in our cultural wanderings. Steve, why don’t you start?

Steve Smith: I certainly had never anticipated, when I spoke to Gabe, that I was going to be the partial subject of a piece in The Atlantic, or I might have dressed better for the occasion. Listings became acutely important to me when I lived in Houston and had no way to attend any of the shows I was reading about in New York. Coming up in Texas, there were alt-weeklies that offered listings of shows around town. I consulted them for what I was doing there, but really I was beginning to live vicariously in the late eighties and into the early nineties by purchasing the Village Voice every week from my local magazine stand and poring over the listings there to see what I was missing or what I might potentially be doing on a fantasy trip to New York City.

On the rare occasions when I had an actual trip to New York City—because my brave younger sister did her undergrad at New York University—I could say, okay, on Monday most things are dark, but I’m going to go see the Village Vanguard big band. Or at that point it would have still been Mel Lewis, I believe. Tuesday night could be Sweet Basil for Steve Lacey; on Wednesday there could be a weird Elliot Sharp thing happening in an obscure warehouse. It was just a way to plot out an itinerary for those fantasy trips.

But it was also just a way to get to know how New York City lived and breathed before I ever came here. When I got here in 1993, I sort of hit the ground running. The Voice was obviously the place I turned first and foremost, but I very quickly got to know Hot House and was picking it up devotedly every time I went to the Village Vanguard or anywhere else of such intelligence and repute that it carried the publication. And I remember distinctly when Time Out New York first appeared. I loved their slogan: “Welcome to New York. Now Get Out.” Which was a kicky way to say, not get out like “leave us,” but get out—go out on the town.

Time Out was the first thing I’d ever seen that was almost one hundred percent listings. Even the articles felt like oversized listings. I read it from issue number one on the newsstand and eventually ended up getting a job there as the classical music listings person, and then in time as the overall music listings person. So that’s my sort of secret origin—from fanboy in Texas to way deep in it here in New York.

Andrew Gilbert: I love that—the aspirational aspect of all the things happening out there and dreaming of being part of it one day.

Chrys Roney: I agree. The Village Voice was the standard, but the New York Times was giving them a little bit of run for their money. I worked for the New York Times while I was in grad school, so we paid attention to a lot. Between the two, you knew everything. When I did arrive in New York, Art Blakey was my babysitter. He was one of them—between Art Blakey and George Butler. My brother would just drop me off somewhere and say, “Here, don’t let her run around the city.” So Art had me at Sweet Basil on Mondays to watch the band, and if I didn’t show up, he was going to find me—and trust me, he did.

So Sweet Basil was Hot House. I’m familiar with going through the book—the black and white at that time—and seeing everything and thinking, what is this? Because it’s in shorthand form. So years later, being the publisher of Hot House, it was a blessing, and it wasn’t anything I had planned to do. It’s just how it ended up. And I’ve realized how important listings are to both sides—for the patrons and for the artists. So that’s my two cents.

Andrew Gilbert: Coming of age in Los Angeles in the mid-eighties, listings were everything. It was a way, as a teenager, to start discovering the city, finding where interesting things were happening, and figuring out if you could get there—which in LA can be a real challenge. And then moving back after college in the early nineties, they were just essential.

I remember the LA Jazz Scene, which was a tabloid or foldover that you’d pick up for free at different places. It covered Glendale, Burbank, Crenshaw, Leimert Park. You could see what was going on. It was a map to the city, a way of discovering it as an adult and finding all the amazing things happening. It shaped my musical experience. And thinking about the situation today—a young person coming up on the musician side, as Chrys said, or on the audience side—how do you find out what’s going on? It’s a real challenge. Listings face the challenge of journalism writ large: how do you sustain it? How do you pay for it?

Chrys Roney: I have a question though. There was a listings publication in LA?

Andrew Gilbert: Yes, there was a publication—a free newspaper dropped off in clubs for years that would have extensive monthly listings of what was going on. It was a monthly.

Steve Smith: Was LA Jazz Scene something like the New York City Jazz Record, or whatever the foldover that exists now?

Andrew Gilbert: They would often run a long interview Q&A format with an artist. I left LA in ‘96. It was still around, and I’m not sure when they stopped publishing. I think it may have been around the turn of the century, but I’m not sure.

Steve Smith: The challenge of finding out what’s going on can be paramount, especially in cities like New York and Los Angeles. When you’re in New York, as you were reeling off the neighborhoods surrounding Los Angeles, I was thinking it was publications like Hot House that taught me there was an outer frontier beyond New York City—that there was life in New Jersey, and in fact a whole lot of it. That was where I got to find out what was happening in Newark and Montclair and Orange and everywhere else. So it was a tool that educated me about the city I was now living in, and that was extremely useful as a newcomer.

It’s still useful today. I got a text message yesterday from a close friend—and he and I are both very deeply into this industry and this listings environment—and he said, “Hey, did you know that Marshall Allen is playing tomorrow night across the street from the place where you work?” And I said, why no, I did not. And how is that even possible? As diligently as you think you’re getting things in your email and checking what calendars are left, you miss things and wonder, how did that get by me?

Andrew Gilbert: Steve, I’m curious—how much time do you spend looking for, writing, and compiling the listings in Night After Night?

Steve Smith: I should set this up by saying what I was originally doing. When I started blogging back in 2005, and then when I changed the blog to a Substack in 2020 right at the pandemic, a lot of what I was doing online was tied into what I was doing professionally—whether I was on staff somewhere or freelancing for the New York Times or whatever. The work I put into Substack was work I was already doing: researching other gigs, researching pitches. I thought, well, if I’m doing all of this legwork and writing two listings a week for The New Yorker or whatever it is, I’m going to share all this other stuff. I’ve already compiled it. I don’t need to make extra money for it right this minute. I’m just going to share it and let people find it. And that’s basically what it still is.

I left my full-time employment in the journalism sphere a couple of years ago. The press industry is just contracting at a rapid pace and no one can keep up. So I have a full-time day job outside of journalism now, but as a music consumer and somebody who is still passionate about going out and seeing live music, I’m still tracking all of these calendars and still doing the work. I said, I’m just going to keep going. I’m just going to keep doing the listings that I’ve always done. I’m going to put them out there, and if people find them useful, then God bless—I’ve served somebody beyond my own selfish needs. That’s basically the start and finish of it.

As for time—it’s usually bits and pieces of morning and afternoon before and after the day job. So if the day job is nine to five, I might work for an hour before and an hour after. Once in a while I’ll put in a long evening. That’s also kind of the detriment of the way I’m doing it. If you’re following Hot House, you know it’s going to be there and you know you can go find it. It is a reliable, responsible, diligent publication. If I get tied up with work or if something’s going on at home, I might miss a week, and that really stings. The entire month of January things piled up and I didn’t publish a newsletter, and it really gets to me.

The other beauty of what I’m doing right now is that even when I’m not there, there are a lot of other people doing this, too, and I link out to at least four or five other sources—people who are doing complementary calendars. My way of directing people is, “Hey, if I’m not there, go look to these people. They’re going to hook you up.” We’ve all got our various perspectives and it’s all like a million little views. What I miss is something that’s really reliable, like that section we used to have in the New York Times—expansive and authoritative. When you read a listing by Jon Pareles or by Ben Ratliff, you knew who you were listening to and you trusted them. That trust is the commodity that’s missing right now.

Chrys Roney: And then the Village Voice would give you the alternative—the Times would give you the crème de la crème and the Voice would give you everyone else.

Steve Smith: That’s right.

Andrew Gilbert: That’s an ecosystem. One publication can’t do it all. One person can’t do it all. You need these multiple overlapping voices, and as that erodes, you see the whole arts world suffering—and this is beyond jazz, beyond music. It’s dance, it’s all the performing arts. I’m so worried watching this happen. Cultural coverage is eroding.

Andrew Gilbert: Chrys, I want you to tell the story we talked about before, because I loved hearing it—your experience taking over Hot House Jazz and what the reaction was when you dropped the listings.

Chrys Roney: When I acquired the magazine, I came in as a business person and went, wow, this is how much we have, and this is how much we’re spending. I thought, twelve pages with no revenue? We can cut that out, save money, and become a profitable entity. So one month I cut the listings. Gwen had warned me, “No, we have to make sure this gets in.” I didn’t listen. And I found out that my readers were not there for what I thought they were there for. They were there for the listings. I had at least twenty calls and emails: “No listings this month. Are you missing Jersey? I don’t see Pennsylvania.”

Not only did they know—they tried to hang me. They made sure I understood. Someone called whom I describe as “the mayor.” I won’t give the name out, but I’m pretty sure you guys know who it is. If you want, after the podcast I’ll tell you. He called me. Did the whole spiel. Then he says, “So them listings—very important. Not a good thing, what you did. You want to keep it in every month.” And I said, yes, I got it.

So if nothing else, we have the listings. But the beautiful challenge is that, as we dig in, there are approximately ten thousand shows a month in the markets we’re covering. What has been done was manual, as you mentioned—you’re doing things an hour here, an hour there. We are still humans curating the list, and the clubs and venues don’t always send in the info. So we have to procure it. That’s a full-time venture, and it’s a donation to the industry and to the market, because there’s no money for it. The smaller clubs aren’t paying for that. If we say, “If you don’t submit your listing we won’t list you,” they just shrug. So it’s not really for them—it’s for the readers. It’s for people to know where to go. It’s for the greater good. And when you’re dealing with the greater good, sometimes it’s not about money.

The need for listings has not changed. It’s how we do it. Because I’d love to address that—the listings business is a billion-dollar business. The newer folks jumped in—Eventbrite went over us and said, how do we make money from this? And they’re making money on transactions. Same information, but they say, okay, you like this show? Go ahead and buy a ticket. We get two percent, five percent for you clicking on that. That’s not what we do. Everyone else who’s providing listings isn’t as detailed as we try to be, but the little bit that they are providing, they’re making billions from. It’s a billion-dollar business—we’re just approaching it from a different angle.

Andrew Gilbert: From journalism. That’s so fascinating, Chrys. I hadn’t really thought about it that way. In that sense, that business is selling tickets or facilitating the selling of tickets—sort of a middleman role. And in order to service that, it becomes a listing with text usually provided by the artist. So it’s not a journalistic function in that way, but your average person is getting information and is able to buy the ticket.

Steve Smith: The place that feels a little bit tricky to me is that the one thing we are losing—and I don’t want to turn this into a referendum on the care and feeding of critics—is authority. When you’re faced with those ten thousand gigs that are out there, and first of all, God bless, we have ten thousand gigs to choose from, which is still a miracle in this day and age—when I need assistance weeding through that to figure out what I want to go see, there is a use for authority, for people that you trust.

Once upon a time, you’d go into a record store and ask the clerk what’s good. So it’s the same kind of thing. If I want to go see the absolute best available in mainstream jazz, circa 2026, I’m going to go to Hot House. If I want to know what’s happening on the weird fringes, then I might turn to Otto Orlov at Data Strain or Jim Macnie with his own blog, “Lament for a Straight Line.” Macnie is, to me, the ultimate poet of the listings. He says more in seventy-five words than I say in seven hundred fifty. I’ve admired Jim’s way of crafting a diamond for more years than I can count, and I tell him every chance I get. The publication’s authority, the critic’s authority—those are the things I turn to when I have ten thousand choices and need someone to cut it down. That’s the part that gets lost when we go to Eventbrite, because that is text being generated by an artist, or more likely a paid publicist.

Andrew Gilbert: I wanted to talk a little bit about that side of it—the craft side. Writing items, crit picks—it’s hard. To boil it down is an exercise in concision. It makes my writing better. And of course if you’re writing about artists you have experience with, you get to draw on that. I sort of feel like that’s the art form and the authority you’re talking about. And as Gabriel Kahane said in his story, it serves a role in this ecosystem where you write a brief review, it ends up in an artist’s press kit, and he uses that for decades.

Steve Smith: We had that a lot at Time Out New York. As we’ve heard, the New York Times is mostly focusing on established acts, and The New Yorker too, in its very idiosyncratic way—it’s an elite spin on exactly the same thing. You’re going to hear about Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the biggest clubs and institutions. At Time Out New York, I don’t think we ever fully achieved it, but the stated aspiration was that we’re going to list every single show in town. That is not possible unless you’ve got something the thickness of the King James version, but we would sit there and compile the listings week after week, and on Thursdays we would be in the office furiously inputting copy until two o’clock in the morning to turn out that week’s issue.

When I started there, we had nineteen or twenty pages for music listings, and three or four for classical alone. So by the time I left in 2014, we were down to an average of maybe five pages of music listings and classical had a column.

Chrys Roney: Why?

Steve Smith: I don’t actually know, and that’s the fascinating thing. The entire magazine industry took a huge hit in 2008 when the economy tanked. Time Out did okay, but eventually the advertising went away, and as the advertising left, the page count left and the book got smaller and thinner. I remember by the time I moved away for my two years in Boston, when I came back, Time Out was a free thing I would find in piles on the subway platform. They had changed their model—it became a free giveaway, a little digest, and then it went away entirely. No more print.

Andrew Gilbert: Chrys, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—this large pie, the role listings play in it, and what the vision or ideas are for Hot House Jazz going forward.

Chrys Roney: We are still working things out, but what I can share is this: information is king. The art is king, but from the standpoint of providing information—we’re not yet feeding people as well as we could. We have databases, and I want you to know there are organizations trying to tap into our database, saying, “Hey, you curate, we don’t curate very well. Can we work together?” There’s some interest in that, but when you start dealing with journalism and integrity, you have to walk a fine line.

I think looking at how the next generation accesses information is important, because if we just continue the same way—the books are great, the newsletters are great—they’re not all getting it that way. We’re getting a percentage. So my goal is to take this information and find every way to get it out there so that people can make a decision. We can match the patron with the artist or the experience they want, because there’s so much beauty. Until you walk into that room, you wouldn’t have known—just like you said about Marshall Allen playing across the street from where you work. Who would have thought? Being able to make that match is what we’re trying to find. We’re trying to be limitless.

We started developing a product called Jazz GPT, and it’s in beta right now. There are some interesting things the AI agents don’t do well that it does well. So we’re definitely going into the tech realm—at the same time, we are staying in the publishing realm.

Steve Smith: I love that. And the funny thing about Time Out—and I can say this now with some objective distance—is that as forward-looking and progressive as they were about being a listings bible and motivating people to go out, they were incredibly slow at recognizing what the internet was going to do to everything. Most of the editorial work we wrote back in the day doesn’t exist anywhere on any online archive except for a handful of pages on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It’s not rigorously archived at all.

I find that really lamentable, because you think about the listings and go, oh, it’s a postage stamp worth of text that’s supposed to get butts in the seats at the Vanguard on a Tuesday in February. But if you hold onto those things and put them in the archives and turn them into microfiche or blogs or whatever—it is our history. It’s something that authors, writers, journalists, and historians go back to. And for a lot of artists, like Gabriel Kahane said, it’s the only writing about him that he had for the first few years of his career.

The idea that we lost all that stuff is really heartbreaking to me. And I love what we were just hearing about going to find audiences where they live. I know there’s another initiative going on right now called the Jazz Generations Initiative. They produce events and talks, but they’re moving into the calendar space. And where did they start? Not in a publication, not on a website. They’re putting their listings on Instagram, because that’s where so many eyeballs are. Going to where the people are and saying, hey, there’s this whole other world we’d like to tell you about.

Chrys Roney: I saw them do that. In terms of the archive—you and I see the world similarly and we should talk. We do have an initiative to capture that, because as you know, Hot House has been around for forty-five years. It’s the forty-fifth year, and we have every issue. We have everything. I consider that information an archive and I’ve treated it that way. We have the library, and once there are additional funds, we will probably dig more into that realm and maybe do some research to find some other things before they get too lost.

Steve Smith: Andy, one other thing I would throw in is that I’ve got at least half a foot still in the classical music world, and what gets talked about in that sphere more than anything is some kind of nonprofit model where somebody will put together a listings website, get funding from the usual foundations and sources, and get buy-in from Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic. The money they used to spend on advertising in Time Out could be used to supplement this nonprofit model. There’s been a lot of talk about it for years. I haven’t seen anybody take the next step yet, but I know there is one very successful model in the classical music world that could have broader applications. They’re literally called the Live Music Project. They launched in Seattle, and I know they’re in New York now and a few other cities.

I think a lot of the data-input drudge work—just typing in all the info—is actually fed into their CMS by the presenters. So they are prioritizing what shows up, what typeface, what gets highlighted, who gets a blurb. But a lot of the actual labor is being done by the presenters. It’s another model that’s being explored. Somewhere out there lies the truth.

Chrys Roney: We have a mixture of that, too. Some of our research is coming directly into our system, and we’re building automation, so it’s coming.

Steve Smith: At the end of my time at Time Out, they were just starting to talk about opening the CMS and letting people put events in directly. And we were all resistant to that—we felt we’d lose our editorial authority. But at the end of the day, to be realistic and budget-conscious, there has to be some kind of hybrid where everybody’s pitching in.

Chrys Roney: It has to be social.

Steve Smith: There you go.

Andrew Gilbert: In the Bay Area there is San Francisco Classical Voice, a nonprofit initially funded by Gordon Getty, but they’ve really expanded. They’re covering Los Angeles now and far beyond classical music. I write about jazz for them, and there are extensive listings. That’s been important. And Steve, you sort of took it where I think we want to end up, which is: as Kahane asked, what is to be done? There is this model of presenters and venues subsidizing some kind of outlet, or a change of priorities by the old-line media.

There’s got to be fresh thinking on it, because Instagram is certainly one place where a lot happens, but Instagram is disaggregated—it’s individuals. I don’t see how it works for a broad spectrum of what’s happening. And really, I think we’re fighting the nature of technology algorithms and what the internet is, which works against an analog mindset where you look at a page and find things you weren’t expecting to find. You go into a record store, you’re browsing, and something catches your eye. I don’t know if you can replicate that online. And without that, listings can’t do what they should do—catch your eye. You see a sideman playing and you think, I love George Cables, I don’t know who he’s playing with, but I’m going to go see that gig.

Steve Smith: There’s definitely a lot of career building that goes lacking. And I wonder how the kids who are coming up now—who deserve the attention—are faring. Guitarists like Emmet Cohen, pianists like Yvonne Rogers and Lex Courtney, and whoever else is out there. All these really extraordinary young musicians. The way I find out about half of them is by going and looking at the calendar listings at the new Lower East Side club Closeup, and also at the Jazz Gallery, which is nurturing a lot of those same players. But that’s insider knowledge I’ve accrued over way too many decades of doing this. How do you extend the handout to the newcomer and say, check this out, because this player is going to be tomorrow’s superstar?

Chrys Roney: The information is there and it will always be there. The need for something like a listing will always be there because people by nature get out and do things. But the missing piece that a lot of technology and development has overlooked is the writers—the ability to help make that connection. That’s one of the beauties and challenges we have as well. We have about fifteen writers in our pool who go out to the clubs and try to be familiar with who’s out there and what they’re doing, what they sound like. So when it’s time to cover them or talk about them, we have something to say. But that’s still not enough, because we actually are in a boom—we have a great number of young artists now, comparable to the nineties when they called it the Young Lions era. We’ve got a lot of beauty in young folks.

And then we have older writers who are ignoring them because we don’t know them. Then you wake up and find a Camille Thurman—where did she come from? It’s going to evolve. This is part of the nature of the ecosystem, and I think part of our mission is to make sure we’re keeping the ball moving forward. The solution will come. I don’t ever think listings will go away. It’s just a question of how they will evolve.

Steve Smith: Not to go completely dark on that, but I think just recently we’ve also seen a perspective we didn’t really need. We were all sitting around in New York City when the New York Times got rid of listings and The New Yorker got rid of listings, and there were very few reviews and very little coverage. We think, well, how can you get by with so little coverage? How can you get rid of the listings? They’re so important. And then you see the Washington Post just lop off the whole arts section. We are in a dark place for mainstream media, so the answers are going to come from the grassroots. They’re going to come from Substack writers like me who feel like we’ve got to get the word out there, and they’re going to come from places like Hot House that we’ve been able to turn to for forty-five years, that we’ve come to trust, and that are always there for us.

Andrew Gilbert: The subscription model—the micro-subscription model—might be a way to go, where you build up your audience and people come to depend on you to know what’s going on and are willing to help subsidize it.

Steve Smith: That’s right.

Andrew Gilbert: Well, this has been a great conversation. I really want to thank you both for joining me. I hope our paths cross.