Ben Bartholomew

I’ve been obsessed with music for most of my life. When it’s nearby, I struggle to focus on anything else. I’m also compelled to read and write about music that I love. When I became fascinated with jazz in my early teens, part of the experience of listening to each new CD that I bought was reading the liner notes and learning some context for what I was hearing. I started writing my first (uniformly glowing) gig reviews when I was 15, for publication in the Perth Jazz Society newsletter. I still write about music on Substack and elsewhere.

I love presenting on RTRFM because it deepens my connection to the local and national jazz scenes and lets me share my favourite music with other people. It’s a privilege to be part of an organisation that’s motivated by love of music instead of profit, and that’s committed to promoting diverse, local artists. That commitment is increasingly important; now that so much of our culture is filtered by algorithmic feeds based on our existing preferences and superficial measures of engagement, it’s vital that we preserve ways of finding music that surprises us, grows on us, and connects us to our community.