Pull Up a Chair
A quarterly hang with the Jazz Is Dead family, live.
by Leo Moraes
Since this newsletter stopped being a bulletin and became a place to think out loud with you, the best part hasn’t been the writing. It’s been what comes back. You write in, you challenge us, you tell us how you feel about AI, about your experience carrying the piano, about the record your father played on Sunday mornings, or the small town you grew up in that sounds a lot like ours.
Let me give you one example, because it still makes me smile.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my teenage son asking me for a DVD player.
Then a reader named Vinnie wrote in. It wasn't the first we'd heard from him; he'd commented on earlier articles. He had a DVD player sitting in his garage, doing nothing, and he wanted my son Francisco to have it. No transaction. No angle. A man read a paragraph, thought of a kid he’d never met, and handed over the exact object from the story, out of his garage and into our living room.
That instinct, that quiet, generous reach across the gap, has been the best of what we’ve found these last months. And it’s made us want to close the distance a little more from our side.
So here’s what we’ve built.
The Listening Room is a periodic live conversation where the door is open and you’re in the room with members of the Jazz Is Dead family. I’ll host. The session runs about sixty minutes on a Wednesday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific. The first forty minutes we spend on the ground we’ve been covering here, the kind of thing we usually only get to write toward and never talk through together. The last twenty minutes belong entirely to you. Open floor. Ask what you want, of the people who made the thing
It happens on Substack Live and every session is archived afterward, so the room becomes a small, growing library you can return to. Miss one, and it’s waiting for you. Catch them all, and you’ve got a collection.
The first one is Wednesday, September 2nd, at 6:00 PM PT, and Adrian Younge will be there. The plan is to always have one or more of the original members — Adrian, Ali, Adam, Dru, Jazmin and other friends from this universe, some announced, some not. Musicians, DJs, the people whose names show up in these essays and whose records are in your crate. It’s the same idea Adrian and Ali started with long before any of this had a name: friends in a room talking about what they love. This time you’re in the room.
The Listening Room is the first big thing we’re opening up to paid subscribers, and it won’t be the last, more is on the way. If you’re already with us, we’ll see you on the 2nd. If you’re not, becoming one is the way in.
So: Wednesday, September 2nd, 6:00 PM Pacific. Pour something, pull up a chair, and come hang with us for an hour or so. Bring your questions. Bring your observations. Bring your ideas. We’ll save you a seat.
— Jazz Is Dead
New Merch Line Out Now!
What started as a whisper passed from one person to the next. Not a eulogy, a statement. Everything in this line comes from that same idea: sound as a circle, freedom as discipline, culture as something you carry and hand off, not something you inherit and forget. This collection is for the ones doing the passing.
Full line out now. Link below
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Upcoming Events
KJAZZ IS DEAD @KKJZ 88.1 LA
Every Friday, from 6PM to 8PM PST
Amazing!
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