Jazz in Strange Places

One goal of newspaper management should be to have people on staff whom readers will notice when they arrive and miss when they’re gone. Not all readers, of course, but at least the ones who care about the subjects a given writer was covering. You work in forest products, and after a while you notice that the reporter on the softwood beat is no longer there to break stories. You are a civil servant and suddenly there are stories about intrigue among the cubicles that nobody else has uncovered. You care about movies and Jay Scott dies. The best writers matter, not by dint of style or cheek but of authority. Newspapers cannot survive if there are too many people writing for them who might as well, for all the difference they make, not be writing for them.

This is the modest tribute history pays to the modest Mark Miller: for 27 years he covered jazz for The Globe and Mail. He left last December. And already with a flashlight and a team of hounds you can’t...