MUSIC: "Jazz doesn’t represent American culture today."

The number of readers who complain that they don’t get enough to read about jazz here is... small. But if there are any of you out there, here’s a readers’ Q&A with New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, who is so eerily free from the leaden orthodoxies of jazz writing as it’s been practised since the 1970s that the only way to demonstrate how independent-minded he is would be to make you sit through a lot of awful jazz criticism. And then I’d have no readers left at all. Instead, here’s a pleasant hour with a modest and thoughtful music writer.