Free Tickets, Steak Dinners, and the Ethics of Jazz Journalism

Jazz criticism has always operated in close quarters: small rooms, tight communities, artists who become sources and sometimes friends. That proximity is part of what makes the writing worth reading. It's also what makes the ethics complicated.

This episode explores that tension. The guests have significant experience between them navigating exactly these questions, and the conversation goes to some candid places, including a few confessions that probably took some time to make.

Featuring:

• Rick Mitchell
• Hannah Edgar
• Paul de Barros

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.

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

Transcript

Rick Mitchell: I'm Rick Mitchell, journalist, broadcaster, and JJA board member. I will be your host today as we examine issues related to ethics and jazz journalism. I am joined by my guests Paul de Barros and Hannah Edgar. Paul was the jazz critic for the Seattle Times from 1982 to 2023 and has been a regular contributor to DownBeat magazine since 1982.

In 1984, he co-founded the Seattle nonprofit EarShot Jazz. He is the author of Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle and Shall We Play That One Together?: The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland. Hannah is a freelance culture journalist in Chicago. They write for the Chicago Tribune as its freelance jazz critic and contribute to DownBeat, NPR affiliate station WBEZ, and the Chicago Reader. I believe both of you have been on The Buzz before, so welcome back.

Hannah Edgar: Thanks for having us.

Paul de Barros: Thank you, Rick.

Rick Mitchell: Paul, you have been doing this for a long time. Give us an example of a difficult ethical issue or issues that you have had to deal with in your career.

Paul de Barros: There have been instances where I've been approached by a club or an artist or an agent, and they've said they'd really like to get into Jazz Alley—it's a major club here in Seattle. I would confess that I've been guilty of saying I would really love to see them there too, and I've gotten into conversations with the club owner or whoever was booking and said I could probably do a preview if they booked a certain person.

So I think that is an ethical conflict, but it's a line I've crossed a couple of times. I'm not really reporting a success, but more of a failure to actually acknowledge a line that shouldn't have been crossed.

Rick Mitchell: Weren't these artists that you would have written about if they were coming to town?

Paul de Barros: Absolutely. These were people like the World Saxophone Quartet.

Rick Mitchell: Hannah, I know you have a personal ethics statement posted on your website. Could you share that with us or explain it to us and possibly give us an example of when or how your values have been challenged?

Hannah Edgar: Sure. I guess just to state the obvious: when we're talking about ethics and journalism, we're standing on some shifting ground—or maybe it's not as shifting as I think it is. So few of us are full-time staff members with a publication, which also changes the ethical landscape.

You have many clients, and I've definitely had conversations with my editors where—for example, the Tribune, for which I do about half of my bylined work—just ten or fifteen years ago, you could not freelance for another publication if you freelanced for the Tribune. They considered it a proprietary relationship. That's simply not possible now; it's not possible to make a living that way, so it's no longer an expectation. But when you're working for many people, I'm finding that different clients have different tolerances for what they'll allow. Working in not just the jazz but also the classical sphere, there's a lot of in-house writing that I do for either labels or organizations. I have to be very careful that they're not labels or organizations that I cover, and if they are, that they understand that my writing—liner notes, for example—means I can't cover the album.

To circle back to your question about why I added that ethics statement: I just really never want to be on the wrong end of this. If anything, I over-disclose and try to be very stringent about that.

I think there are enough experiences I've had in my professional career already that have made it pretty clear to me that people see me a specific way, whether because of my age, my gender, or my gender expression. I want to be as by-the-book as possible because it already sometimes feels a little miraculous that I get to write for some of the places I write. I really try to be as old-school as possible about that, so it's like: maybe you have something against me, but you don't have this. That's what went into my ethics statement on my website, and it was definitely inspired by my own experiences and conversations I've had with people.

As you can see, it's pretty short. The elevator summary of it is: I am going to run things by the publication I'm working for because the standards vary so much.

Rick Mitchell: From 1989 to 1999, I was the jazz and popular music writer for the Houston Chronicle. I'm not going to mention this person's name, but I hadn't been in town all that long. This fellow was a good guitar player and had put out an album of his own. He came up to me at a club gig and put a little bag of white powder in my hand.

Paul de Barros: This sounds like the seventies, not the nineties.

Rick Mitchell: Well, yeah. I said, "Dude, those days are over, and it doesn't work that way anymore—if it ever did." As it turned out, it actually was a good album, and I wrote about it, but obviously I didn't take the bribe.

Paul de Barros: Oh, that's terrible.

Rick Mitchell: It is.

Hannah Edgar: Wow.

Rick Mitchell: So Paul, has anybody ever offered you drugs or money? And I don't know if you've done radio programs—does this apply to both print journalism and radio, in which case it would be considered payola?

Paul de Barros: I'm sorry to say nobody's ever offered me drugs.

I was writing for the weekly and maybe the Seattle Times too. In the eighties, there was this pair of guys who had been around Seattle for several years and had a little bit of success in the late sixties and early seventies playing a kind of jazz-rock fusion—pretty shallow style. They found out about me, and they were determined to take me out to dinner and charm me into writing about their record. With a sneaky sense of what was going on, I said, sure, let's go. They took me out to a big steak dinner at a fancy place, and at the end of the dinner they said, well, here's our record—you're going to write about it, right? And I said, hell no, absolutely not. I got such pleasure out of seeing their faces, because I knew they really thought they could pull that off. Needless to say, they never spoke to me again.

To think they could really buy a good review with a steak dinner. But I do remember there was a woman here who once sent a bottle of really good red wine and wonderful chocolate to my house, and I wasn't going to throw it away. I certainly wasn't going to call her up and give it back, but I never wrote about her record. I think the stakes are so low in what I was doing that nobody really had the wherewithal. If you're in the rock world, that's a whole different business.

Rick Mitchell: Well, from your description of that band's music, you were possibly doing them a favor by not reviewing their album.

Paul de Barros: You're absolutely right, because I wouldn't have had much nice to say about it.

Rick Mitchell: Hannah, have any of these circumstances come your way yet?

Hannah Edgar: I notice it a lot with publicity folks asking to meet up in person in town, and then when we do go out and I'm still candid, they suddenly don't really want a lot to do with me—there seems to have been something strategic about the offer to meet up. I'm starting to get very choosy about who I actually spend in-person time with.

This comes down to being a freelancer. If you're already working sixty-hour weeks, I don't know how productive it is for either of us to meet up in person when I can't even guarantee coverage. I'm not my own editor.

That actually circles back to my personal ethics statement. I just wanted to put on there, as a yardstick, that I won't accept any favors beyond a coffee. I can think of a time when the head of a major arts organization in Chicago wanted to meet somewhere fancy near the hall. I really didn't want to do it, and I ended up having to pay for it myself, because the Tribune's ethics agreement says you cannot receive any favors beyond the price of a key chain—which I think is a humorous unit of currency, but they're serious about that.

Rick Mitchell: Does the Tribune accept free tickets to concerts that you're going to be reviewing?

Hannah Edgar: My take on that is that if we were expressly denied free tickets, we would potentially mention it in the review. This came up recently—if someone decides to take away press access, that's something we might note in the review, if it's retributory. I've always successfully been able to wrangle press tickets, because if there was a situation where I had to buy a ticket, I don't know that the Tribune and other papers quite have an apparatus for that. I suppose I could file an expense form, but a lot of publications increasingly don't reimburse for that kind of thing.

Rick Mitchell: Paul, you're well known in Seattle within music circles. When you show up at a jazz club, do they say, "Hey, good to see you again," and wave you on in?

Paul de Barros: Yes.

Rick Mitchell: Even now that you're no longer at the Seattle Times?

Paul de Barros: Yeah, I have a kind of emeritus status, which is nice.

Paul de Barros: I want to say something about this free ticket business, though—a couple of things. The first is that I taught a class in the history of reviewing at one point, and to use your phrase, Hannah, "press access"—the whole newspaper reviewing business started as a species of news. It wasn't really a species of criticism at first; it turned into criticism. The reason the New York Times covered what was on Broadway in 1885 is that it was news whether a famous performer was there, and then whether the show was good or bad also became a species of news. We came to this game late. So I think there's a fair argument that free tickets aren't so much free tickets as press access.

However, I would make the cynical distinction here that ethics really depends on who can afford it. I've worked at the Seattle Times in three different eras. I've worked in an era so fat—in the nineties—that they decided we're not going to accept any free tickets to anything, ever again. They wrote out a really explicit ethics policy: you couldn't even get a cup of coffee from anyone with whom you had a critical relationship.

With the big rock arena concerts, paying for a ticket was more complicated than getting a free ticket. It certainly did put us in a position of being very high and mighty—we take nothing from nobody. Well, then guess what happened after 2001, when newspapers collapsed and the Seattle Times went on strike. All of a sudden we were taking free tickets again. Were we unethical? No. We just couldn't afford to buy ten or fifteen thousand dollars' worth of tickets every year. So I have a pretty cynical attitude about the free ticket business.

I'm not cynical about the bribery part of it. People are giving you drugs and dinners and free passes and letting your friends in—it can get to be a bad habit. I've seen in my own long life where it became a really bad habit. There was a man who wrote about rock music in San Francisco in the sixties and seventies who was just the pinnacle of that nonsense, and he wound up getting killed in a car crash with a couple of young women. There's a long history of this, and anyone who's read a lot of old jazz criticism knows that the old critics were all in the game. They would write songs on an album and then review the album. They would promote the artist. In some cases it was really ugly—"sleep with me, or I won't write about you."

Rick Mitchell: What about accepting a free drink in a club—not from the artist, but from the club itself? I confess I've done that. Would either of you do that? You'd take a coffee but not a drink, Hannah—is that right?

Hannah Edgar: Does this even come up? I can think of one time at a showcase where I ordered two drinks and they said don't worry about one of them—it was a glass of wine. That's the only time I can think of. Otherwise, I'm definitely paying for my drinks. If they offered one, yeah, but to be honest, I'm drinking less than I was a couple of years ago, so I might not be ordering at the gig anyway.

Paul de Barros: When I was under that really strict policy at the Times, I definitely didn't touch a thing. I generally stuck to that. There have been occasions at Jazz Alley, but usually when I'm not writing, someone like John Dimitri will say, "Hey, that's on us tonight." But I'm not really in the game as much now. If that had happened when I was really writing all the time, especially when I was the pop music editor, I would have said no.

It's not that one free drink is going to tarnish you for life. It's just that once you get in that groove, you're in somebody's pocket, and that's not where you want to be. You want to be an independent voice and maintain the wherewithal to say what you actually thought. I'm sure we've all had the experience where club owners tell you, "One more bad review and we're going to go out of business." I became very hard-nosed about that very quickly. If you're going out of business because of my reviews, you shouldn't be in business. You're putting the wrong people on stage.

Hannah Edgar: I know we talked about this a little bit in the last episode of the podcast I was on. Obviously we believe in jazz criticism on this call—it's a JJA podcast—but do we really think criticism goes from A to Z like that? I have no insight into it, and thankfully that's not something I've encountered from club owners here in Chicago.

Paul de Barros: Oh, that you had any power to control the level of their business?

Hannah Edgar: No one's ever implied that. It's always been more like "a rising tide lifts all ships—we're just glad you're writing at this point."

Rick Mitchell: You know, back in the 1950s, writing liner notes became basically a way to make a living. Writers weren't necessarily getting paid a lot of money to write for DownBeat or Metronome, and they probably weren't getting a lot of money to write liner notes either. But it was a way to augment their income. Nat Hentoff was on countless liner notes, Leonard Feather—and yet even if they weren't reviewing the actual album they wrote the liner notes for, they could be reviewing the next album from the same label, whether Blue Note or Prestige. Was that a conflict of interest? Where's the line drawn on that?

Hannah Edgar: I wouldn't do it. You're too close to the project. In some ways you'd be the best person to write about it, but to write about it critically, you would have kind of coasted along with the process with the artists—that's a hurdle I'd have a tough time hopping over. The second issue is that with paid liner note writing, you're double-dipping: you're basically covering the same project twice.

And don't get me wrong, I do that in the sense that I preview and review projects. Even that is sometimes tricky—when you preview something and get so excited, it does make it a little tougher to review with fresh eyes. Now, this is also just a function of there simply not being enough people writing about this stuff. So I do sometimes double-dip—I'll definitely be previewing and reviewing for International Jazz Day out here. But there's something different about being paid by the organization you're covering. A preview is one thing; getting paid by two independent journalistic entities is quite another.

I know that wouldn't fly at the Tribune, and other folks I work for certainly wouldn't have it either.

Paul de Barros: I remember getting into a really deep discussion about this in the early days of the EarShot Jazz publication. My feeling is that there's no conflict of interest financially—it's not double-dipping in that sense. Let's say you write liner notes for an ECM record and get your three hundred or five hundred dollars. If the record sells a million copies, you still only get your three hundred or five hundred dollars. So whether or not you say it's a great record or a bad record, there's no financial conflict of interest. But I agree with what you said very eloquently, Hannah: it's a conflict of interest intellectually and emotionally, because when you write the liner notes, you're on the side of the product. You've already taken a side. Your job is to make the record sound better than it maybe even is. You're a promoter, a plugger for the record. I don't know anybody who has ever written a liner note and said, "Boy, these tunes really suck"—even if they think so.

And then when you go to review it, you have to put on a completely different hat. As an editor, I remember distinctly not permitting that—ever. I admit to having done it once or twice in a forty-five-year career, but I think it's a bad idea because it doesn't feel right.

Rick Mitchell: I'll give you an example of something I did a long time ago that didn't feel right. In 1983, I wrote for the Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and I put together an all-star band of young jazz musicians. What we wanted to play was too loud and too radical for jazz clubs, so we had to play in rock clubs—it was a kind of avant-garde, funk-punk jazz band. We got a rock singer, kind of a David Bowie/Lou Reed type. And we were nominated in the Willamette Week's annual music poll for best new band, and we won.

I was the one whose job it was to count the votes.

Paul de Barros: That's awesome. That's a really deep conflict, Rick. I'm glad you're finally letting that out.

Rick Mitchell: I told the editor I should not be the one doing this, and they said they didn't have anybody else—plus I was getting paid, of course, as a freelancer. It created some bad blood with other musicians in town, and deservedly so. Although the quality of the musicians in the band—myself excluded—was not in question. It was my band, but I was by far the least virtuosic person in it. Nobody could take that away from them; they deserved that recognition as individual musicians. But it was definitely a conflict of interest. I survived it, but it still bothers me to this day.

Paul de Barros: Did you keep playing music, Rick?

Rick Mitchell: Yes.

Paul de Barros: Because I wouldn't hire anybody at the Seattle Times who played music. I just told them straight out: I don't want your byline in my newspaper if you're out there competing with other bands that are being reviewed in this newspaper.

Hannah Edgar: Damn.

Paul de Barros: I know that's harsh, but I still believe it. Some of the best jazz criticism that's ever appeared in DownBeat has been by musicians, and it's really interesting. I just wrote a book about Marian McPartland—she wrote for DownBeat for three years, and she agreed with me in the end that it was a big fucking mistake. You do not want to be out there judging your peers. It's a very bad idea.

Rick Mitchell: I stopped playing music when I got the full-time job at the Houston Chronicle. I never played music professionally in Houston. I would occasionally jump on stage and sit in when bands from Portland came through town, but in Portland we had a pretty successful band for about four years.

Paul de Barros: I think it's okay to play music, but if you're going to play music professionally—try to get reviews, try to make money—I don't think you should be a critic.

Hannah Edgar: A lot of my friends who are fantastic writers—far more fantastic than I'll ever be—primarily make their bread and butter in music. They find what I do kind of stomach-churning to imagine doing themselves, and it completely informs how they've structured their careers. The friends I just mentioned tend to do a lot of fantastic liner note writing, but that's not criticism, so it's not terribly complicated for them. And I count my lucky stars every day. I was always a mediocre violinist, just playing in amateur groups. It's very uncomplicated for me.

Paul de Barros: (laughter)

Rick Mitchell: And you mentioned in that previous podcast that you have an agreement with your violin teacher that you can't write about her.

Hannah Edgar: Not everyone would agree to that kind of arrangement, so she's pretty good about it.

Rick Mitchell: Let's go in a different direction. What about dealing with problematic artists or publicists who insist on seeing what you've written before it runs, or tell you that certain topics are not open for discussion when you're doing a pre-publication interview with an artist?

Paul de Barros: I've never really encountered that. That's more of a Hollywood thing. The one time I did encounter it was with a rock guitar player who became a TV star, and her publicist wanted to be on the line for a big feature story for the Sunday Seattle Times. I said, "That's not happening." They said, "Then the interview's not happening." So I agreed to it, but I really chafed at that. They didn't tell me what to write, but clearly they were policing their artist. I realize this happens all the time in the film world—a film critic told me you just don't interview Meryl Streep without her publicist listening. I said I was glad I wasn't in that business. I just laugh at publicists when they get ridiculous.

Hannah Edgar: I'd be curious to know, if any of our publicist peers are listening, what publicists are taught about whether that's right or wrong. If a publicist is on the line, I don't tell them to get off, because often in some of the beats I cover, the publicist is on there to learn more about the project so it can inform their publicity.

Paul de Barros: Classical?

Hannah Edgar: Those are usually publicist-free landscapes, thank God. But sometimes it's like, "Hey, I'm actually on here so I understand how the artist is talking about the project." Good ones will tell me that's why they're on the call. If you're talking to someone like Itzhak Perlman, whom I interviewed last year, okay—the publicist is on the call. That's not my favorite thing in the world, but I think with someone of a certain stature, they're going to say what they want to say whether or not the publicist is there. Itzhak Perlman will say what he wants to say. So that doesn't bother me.

I also have not had the experience of people policing subjects, although I certainly know it happens and I know colleagues who've experienced it. I have had people ask, "Can I see the draft ahead of time?" I think that just chalks up to a lack of knowledge about how journalism works. I haven't had anyone bully me hard about it. I'm just honest with them and very clear about what the stakes are for me—if a publication found out I had given someone a draft, I lose credibility. People tend to be sympathetic about that, assuming they've had good dealings with me.

Paul de Barros: I agree with you, Hannah, that it's mostly from people who are green and don't know how it works—a family member when you're writing an obituary saying, "Can I see it before it comes out?" No. Write your own. That's just a cardinal rule. It is just a rabbit hole if somebody actually gets to see what you write. I'd rather have a mistake in print and correct it later.

Rick Mitchell: What about writing about artists you don't have a professional relationship with, but you do have a personal relationship with—you're good friends? How do we handle that?

Hannah Edgar: I wouldn't do it. This is something I also worked into my ethics statement: even if I feel like I could do it honestly, avoiding the appearance of a conflict is also pretty important to me. And I think it's worth turning the question around: define "good friends."

I had an interesting experience where someone I respected a lot—I'd been to one of her birthday parties, though she invited about a hundred people, so I was one of the hundred—I covered a project of hers later that year, and she did not like an aspect of the coverage. I wouldn't have described us as friends, exactly. "Friendly" is how I would have described the relationship. But the agony that put me through told me I had misgauged our relationship. I was really suffering as a result of this, and it made it clear that maybe I had not categorized our relationship correctly—and maybe she hadn't either, because she still said, "Come cover my projects, I love it when you cover my projects." It's a case where you didn't like one facet of the coverage—so what do we do now? It was definitely a learning experience. If it was someone who is genuinely a friend of mine, it's a no-go.

I'm lucky that most of my friends are in their twenties or thirties and still coming up in their respective spheres. But I've got a couple of friends where, when they're on big stages, I'm going to have to fully recuse. There's no way around it.

Rick Mitchell: As a freelancer, you have some choice, but if you're on staff, you can't really tell your editor you can't take an assignment because you've become friends with the subject. Have you ever been in that situation, Paul?

Paul de Barros: No. And I think I look at it a little differently. What you were saying, Hannah, about misjudging the relationship with that performer—I think it's a personal decision. I don't think writing about people you know is inherently a conflict of interest. What is a friend? I have a million friends. As a certain Bob Dylan line goes—

Rick Mitchell: You contain multitudes. I know that.

Paul de Barros: I think it's definitely given rise to difficult situations in my life. I came up at a time when writing about jazz was criticism, but it was also considered a kind of cultural advocacy, because jazz was overlooked and didn't get the money. I understand that lineage because I grew up in San Francisco. Ralph Gleason was kind of a guide for me, as was Nat Hentoff—the former Leroi Jones, that whole generation. They were advocates for the music. So it made sense that you would befriend Charles Mingus, for example, whom I befriended when I was in college. The problem with writing about Mingus wasn't that it was a conflict of interest, because I would say something not too nice about him. The problem would be that he would get so angry about what I said that I was putting myself in a compromising situation.

I've gone through many examples of that in my career in Seattle, because most of the really good musicians here I consider my friends. I love them, I love their music, and I champion them all the time. It happened with Denney Goodhew, who just died last week. Twenty or thirty years ago I went to a concert of his and it just wasn't working. So I said that. Denny didn't talk to me for two years. That's on me—you just have to shrug and say, okay, that's what happened.

But I certainly don't see it as a conflict of interest, because I don't hold back when people are friends. And the stakes are so small in a town like Seattle's jazz scene that the appearance of having a conflict of interest—"You're favoring him over me"—that kind of gossip goes on, but it goes on anyway.

Rick Mitchell: Have we gone too far in the other direction, though? Paul, you still write for DownBeat. You don't read very many, if any, negative reviews these days. Nobody gets worse than two and a half stars.

Paul de Barros: I try to write my share.

Paul de Barros: Honestly, that's the first thing people say to me: "I like your stuff in DownBeat—you actually say when you don't like something."

Rick Mitchell: But you have to admit it's nowhere near as frequent overall as it once was. Remember Weather Report getting one star for Mr. Gone?

Paul de Barros: There are a lot of reasons for that.

Rick Mitchell: One star.

Paul de Barros: I don't think it involves conflict of interest.

Rick Mitchell: No, not conflict of interest.

Rick Mitchell: What about writing a review when you're just in a bad mood—not a conflict of interest, but perhaps a conflict of ethics? If you're being objective, you were not mentally prepared to reach the state of equanimity required for consistent music criticism. If your opinion is going to be worth anything, you have to uphold a consistent set of aesthetic values. And sometimes you just aren't hearing it, and it's not the music—it's you.

Hannah Edgar: But I have to say: when you walk into a gig in a bad mood and you leave in a great mood, you know what review you're going to write. So there's that.

Rick Mitchell: Well said. And that's happened to me not too long ago, actually.

Paul de Barros: I think that's a really mature observation, Rick, and it's not something that comes to us when we're young. I remember the night it actually happened to me. I was at a Willie Nelson show at the Coliseum here, and I looked around and saw everybody completely enraptured.

And I just snapped out of it and realized: that's what they mean by a bad mood. I don't know what it was, but I was in a bad mood. You have to be alert to that. It's something that comes with time and experience.

Rick Mitchell: Well, Willie might have offered you something that would have put you in a better mood.

Paul de Barros: Yes, he would have. He did, later.

Rick Mitchell: We're about to run out of time here. Anyone have any closing thoughts?

Hannah Edgar: I feel like honesty is always the best policy. There are so many schools of thought on this, and I don't ever want to have what Gen Z calls "main character energy"—where you're the protagonist of your own story and you keep reminding people of it. What I will say is I'm starting to use a lot more first person in my reviews, because I think making my perspective explicit allows people to assess my criticism a little better. Like: I'm thirty, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, now I live in Chicago, I'm also a classical music writer.

Not that I lead with that preamble, but for example, there's something I was covering at the CSO where I really hated all of the Beethoven commemorations tied to his 250th anniversary—where no new music was permitted unless it was an homage to Beethoven. I ranted about that in the lead, but then used it as a pivot to get into why I surprised myself by liking the concert that followed that conceit. So it was like: I am the curmudgeon here, I would usually hate this—and I left totally transfixed. I like to break the fourth wall that way. On my blog, I'd disclose when I have personal relationships with people I mention. It probably doesn't belong in professional writing, but yeah—as we're talking about mood and the orientation at which we come into a concert, and the ways our perspective can be colored, I've just started divulging it.

Rick Mitchell: Back in the 1970s, there was a rock critic named Lester Bangs.

Hannah Edgar: Oh, of course.

Rick Mitchell: Who started a whole school of rock criticism that was essentially: it's all about me. It's not the music—it's how I am hearing the music. He would frequently catalog every illegal substance he had ingested prior to his listening experience. I recently reread one of his books, and to be honest, it hasn't held up all that well in my opinion.

Hannah Edgar: Oh my God.

Paul de Barros: I think one way to sum up this discussion is that ethics in journalism is important, we have to think about it, and we need to try to be honest. Daily newspapers probably excel at this more than any other institution. The magazine culture is completely different—I've experienced two completely polar-opposite standards. If I was invited on a jazz cruise, the Seattle Times couldn't even mention that it had happened, much less review it. But DownBeat was happy to have the review.

It would be ideal if DownBeat could buy plane tickets to fly me to festivals in Estonia, but they don't, and I would rather know what's going on in Estonia. And I respect myself enough that when I go to these places, if something stinks, I say it stinks. If the festival is presented poorly, I say it's presented poorly, even if they've put me up in a five-star hotel. It's still an appearance of a conflict of interest—it is a conflict of interest—but I got to meet a lot of Turkish musicians and tell you about them. For me, it was worth it.

Rick Mitchell: I think we can end it right there. Thank you both very much for contributing to this conversation. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Hannah. We'll see you again.

Paul de Barros: Thank you both. Great to meet you, Hannah.

Hannah Edgar: Cheers. Likewise, Paul.