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Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Part 7: The Verdict

John Coltrane My old neighbor Joe T., now deceased, used to say that you don't know what you are thinking until you try to write it. He was careful thinker, and I came to believe he was correct. Joan Didion concurred, saying, "I write to find out what I am thinking." Yes, there undoubtedly is something to this, something that is lost in the era of the podcast. Vastly more people now listen to podcasts than engage in long form reading, which doesn't bode well for critical thinking. Unless one is gifted with fluency in extemporaneous speaking, or with conducting an interview, what actually is happening in a live conversation is that ideas start sliding all over the place, and while the listener thinks they know what they are hearing, if they tried to report back their impressions, they would be just that, imprecise and incoherent.  Which is a long way of saying that writing this series did indeed help me understand what I think about matters of influence and race in jaz

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