Everything Matters: A Radically Subjective Review

The Dave Holland New Quartet at the New Mexico Jazz Festival

The Dave Holland New Quartet (Photo: Kris Davis’s Facebook page)

I’ve long chafed at critical objectivity or the reviewer’s pretense that nothing matters outside of art itself.

Critical objectivity can have good intentions, like the aim for a pure evaluation method with universal relevance. Too often, though, objectivity’s certainty feels like a defensiv…