- Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
- Neil Tesser accepting his Grammy
The applause that broke out as Neil Tesser accepted his Grammy Award puzzled me a little—and, as he told me later, surprised Tesser as well. He was taking the occasion to say a few words on behalf of the category he won in—album liner notes—and if the words rang, they also sounded self-evident.
“It seems a lot of people remember reading these back-of-the-disc essays and learning from them,” he replied, “and that they miss the fact that music downloads and streaming, which are the preferred methods of consuming music these days, contain no information about the songs or albums—not even the personnel or recording statistics. I was simply planning to remind people that these essays have often been important and can continue to be so; I had no inkling that my comments would strike a chord with so many in the audience, and later, online [primarily Facebook].”
Tesser is a longtime Reader jazz critic who wrote the Playboy Guide to Jazz, has hosted jazz shows on WBEZ and on WSBC and WCFJ, and as a member of the Recording Academy is a former vice chair of the board of trustees—”which was crazy for a writer to have that position,” he said; “no writer had that before.” In the late 70s and early 80s Tesser doubled as the Reader‘s Hot Type columnist. In that space he introduced the coveted BAT award, which he’d give each spring to the local baseball writer who least embarrassed himself trying to predict the previous year’s pennant races and which I, on taking over the BAT in the post-Tesser Hot Type era, exploited as an annual opportunity to favorably contrast my generosity of spirit with Tesser’s peevish contempt for human folly.
His cynicism about baseball writers doesn’t extend to everyone else.
