Sitemap - 2023 - The Honest Broker

My 10 Most Popular Articles of 2023

How to Dress Like Duke Ellington

The Best Online Essays & Articles of 2023

How Corporate America Killed a Lifestyle That Threatened Its Dominance

How Bing Crosby Made Silicon Valley Possible

How African Musicians Came to Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Do You Know What It Means to Mistrust New Orleans?

Car Drivers Torment a City with Celine Dion Songs

18 Warning Signs of a Deadly New Lifestyle

My Ultimate Texas Songwriter Playlist

In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War

The 100 Best Recordings of 2023 (Part 2 of 2)

The 100 Best Recordings of 2023 (Part 1 of 2)

How Musicians Invented the Antihero

The Best Recordings of 2023 (Honorable Mention List)

Stoicism in the Gioia Family

Open Thread: What Are Your Picks for the Cultural Highlights of 2023?

Music Journalism Has a Problem

Notes Toward a New Romanticism

My 50 Favorite Albums from the Golden Age of Capitol Records (Part 2 of 3)

How To Kill a Superhero

Hey Madonna, Let Me Bring My Band to Your Concert

A Landlubber’s Guide to Sea Shanties

12 New Albums I'm Enjoying Right Now (All Styles, All Genres)

Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried

10 YouTube Videos I'm Enjoying Right Now

50 Essential Works of Horror Fiction (Part 2 of 2)

12 Predictions on the Future of Song Investing

My Ultimate Horror Fiction Reading List (Part 1 of 2)

Dave Hickey on Dolly Parton and Richard Pryor

My Lost Gumby Essay

The Death of Information

My 'Personal Favorites' Carla Bley Playlist

Judgment Day Arrives at the Washington Post

My 12 Favorite Problems

The Origins of Modern Jazz Piano in 10 Tracks (1940-1950)

The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty

Half of Waking Hours Are Now Devoted to Entertainment

Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs (Part 1 of 3)

My 50 Favorite Albums from the Golden Age of Capitol Records (Part 1 of 3)

How I Survived (Barely) as a Jazz Musician at Business School

AI Is Defeated in Hollywood—But What About Music?

My Favorite Jazz Album Covers

How Musicians Invented Stand-Up Comedy

Why Did Social Media Go to War Against Writers?

Jim Croce and Me

10 New Albums I'm Recommending Right Now

Investment Funds Are Now Selling the Rock Songs They Bought

An Open Letter to Taylor Swift

10 Underrated Modern Piano Concertos

Why Is Music Getting Sadder?

Nobody Will Tell You the Ugly Reason Apple Acquired a Classical Music Label

The 30 Most Intriguing Musical Artists of 2023 (Part 3 of 3)

Open Thread: What Is Your Spiciest Hot Take?

Could Any Other Jazz Trumpeter Match Up with Louis Armstrong in the 1930s?

Why Do I Keep Saying the Culture is Stagnating?

We Need More Jazz Vinyl Cafés

“The Only Sensible Person in the World”

The Death of the Slow Dance (and Other Emerging Trends)

Ugly Numbers from Microsoft and ChatGPT Reveal that AI Demand is Already Shrinking

65 Things I Want from the Web (But Almost Never Get)

Why Are Music Fans Throwing Things at Pop Stars?

If I Ran a Major Record Label...

KEITH JARRETT

Why Apple Will Acquire Disney

How an Angry Woman in Baltimore Almost Killed the Jazz Age

How Musicians Invented the Law

How I Take Notes

8 Musical Collaborations I Wish Had Happened

We Have Entered the Self-Loathing Stage of the Internet

How 'American Graffiti' Invented Classic Rock (and Changed My Life)

Twelve YouTube Videos I'm Enjoying Right Now

Panic Among the Streamers

Is Rock Dead? (and Other Questions from Readers)

The 10 Mistakes I Made as a Music Critic

Tony Bennett’s Greatest Jazz Collaborations

A Tribute to Tony Bennett (1926-2023)

Results of My Survey: Who Deserves Most of the Credit for a Hit Song?

How the Internet Went to Threads

14 New Albums I'm Recommending Right Now

The Number of Songs in the World Doubled Yesterday

Here's My Mission Impossible Article—But I Refuse to Talk About the Movie

Were the First Laws Sung?

Why You Should Skip My Articles and Go Straight to the Comments

Today is Open Mic Anarchy

Are There Alternating Cycles of Hot and Cool in American Cultural History? (Part 2 of 2)

The Hottest Drummer You've Never Heard

30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse

Ted Gioia on discovering the paragon of authenticity in his own home

How I Stopped Hating Steely Dan

Are There Alternating Cycles of Hot and Cool in American Cultural History? (Part 1 of 2)

An Executive Briefing Paper on the Creative Economy

A Tale of Three Songwriters: Duke Ellington, Joni Mitchell & Johnny Green

Nick Drake at Age 75

100 of My Favorite Things in Music (Part 1 of 2)

The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

I Revisit My Doom-and-Gloom Forecasts

Twelve Brutal Truths about AI Music

Give Me Your Best Suggestions for Movies and TV Shows

How Songs Created Western Rational Thinking

Death: A Literary Guide

Is There Such a Thing as Western Harmony?

How I Disintermediated My Writing Career

An Analysis of 47 Million Transactions Tells an Amazing Story about the Music Business

The Hit Singles of Sun Ra

In 1970, Alvin Toffler Predicted the Rise of Future Shock—But the Exact Opposite Happened

When a Single Person Controlled the Copyright on All Music (Even Blank Music Paper)

Get Ready to Pay More for Music

I'm Confessing that I Love Doris Day

12 Outstanding New Albums by 12 Artists from 12 Countries

A Conversation with Jason Moran

I Talk with an AI Music Historian

Can Songs Really Replace Philosophy?

The Brilliant Bad Decisions of John Luther Adams

Judgment Day Has Arrived for the Journalism Business

8 Pieces of Advice for Struggling Young Musicians (or Other Creative People)

Why Recording Studios Are Unplugging From the Internet

When Duke Ellington Came to North Dakota

My Lifetime Reading Plan

The 30 Most Intriguing Musical Artists of 2023 (Part 2 of 3)

How Christopher Burney Discovered Mindfulness in a Nazi Solitary Confinement Cell

How Saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre Taught Me Organizational Theory

The 20 Greatest Hits of The Honest Broker

Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song

How Musicians Were the First Heroes—And Their Songs a Kind of Superpower

Jazz Piano Innovator Ahmad Jamal Is Dead at Age 92

Why Do Young People Keep Telling Me That Jazz is Romantic?

The Scarcest Thing in the World

Introducing Substack Notes—A New Forum for Ideas & Dialogue on the Web

The Decline and Fall of the Hit Instrumental Song

A Scandal Is Taking Place in American Music This Week

The 30 Most Intriguing Musical Artists of 2023 (Part 1 of 3)

Why Were Execution Ballads So Popular in Europe?

How Many New Songs Are Released Each Day?

Where Did Musicology Come From?

Why I've Decided to Become a Shareholder of Substack

How an IBM Computer Learned to Sing (1961)

We're Living in a Scroll-and Swipe Doom Loop Culture

Boom Times for the End of the World

Six Recent Studies Show an Unexpected Increase in Classical Music Listening

The State of Protest and Political Music in the Year 2023

Is Facebook's Metaverse Turning Into a Ghost Town?

Who Inspires You Among Living Musicians, Writers, and Other Creative Individuals?

Eleven New Albums I'm Recommending Right Now

Audiences Grow Weary of Stories that Never End

What You Want to Know About the Sax (But Were Afraid to Ask)

What I Learned from Emily Post's 'Etiquette' (1922)

How Wayne Shorter Transformed Jazz Composition in the 1960s

Remembering Wayne Shorter (1933-2023)

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Turns 50

My Crazy Plan to Save the Newspaper Business

The 4 Types of College Papers for English Majors

The 50 Best Works of Non-Realist Fiction of the 21st Century (Part 5 of 5)

How Long Does Pop Culture Stardom Last?

My Lifelong Quest for Silence

Why Musicians Can't Retire

Over the Course of 72 Hours, Microsoft's AI Goes on a Rampage

The Real Story of Blues Legend Robert Johnson's 'Deal with the Devil' at the Crossroads

8 New Albums I'm Enjoying Right Now

I Need to Tell You About My Interesting Brother

The State of the Culture (2023)

A Chilling Paragraph from 1960

10 YouTube Videos I'm Enjoying Right Now

What Did Robert Johnson Encounter at the Crossroads? (Part 1 of 2)

Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time

Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews?

Every Prediction from My Teenage Years Turned Out Wrong

The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn't What You Think

How a Single Person Changes a Culture

How to Make $100 Million Playing Clarinet

Impersonating Famous Musicians: A Two Thousand Year History

My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character

Why Was King Tut Buried with a Trumpet?

Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?

The 50 Best Works of Non-Realist Fiction of the 21st Century (Part 4 of 5)

How I Got an AI Theme Song for My Substack

The Woman Who Abandoned a Successful Recording Career to Play Music for the Dying

I'm Starting the New Year by Asking Your Advice

Did Bach Draw on Native American Musical Traditions?