Editor Miriam Zolin is high on enthusiasm but notably low on criticism. During her interview with Australian jazz player Mike Nock, she says, ‘I’m the opposite of intellectual when it comes to music. I only feel it.’ ‘Only feeling it’ doesn’t augur well for perceptive writing about music; it privileges a ‘sublime unknowing’ that negates opportunities for analysis. Perhaps this is not the explicitly stated purview of Extempore, but the publication clearly values itself as engaged and intelligent. This makes its overarching writerly tenor – a kind of uncritical, almost gauche reverie about jazz that lacks rigour – ultimately unrewarding.

Still, there is some strong writing in Extempore 2. Ken Bolton’s ‘Boundless (Sasha)’ captures the structural freedoms of jazz in its tumbling cadences, and Andrew W. Hurley’s essay on German expatriate Horst Liepolt’s centrality to Australian jazz history overcomes its academic stuffiness to trace an overlooked intervention in our cultural landscape. Sascha Feinstein’s essay on William Matthews’s Charles Mingus poems is perceptive and erudite.

Ultimately, I wonder about Extempore’s purpose. Its desire to merge music writing, interviews with musicians, photography and jazz-ish poetry and fiction is admirable, but it lacks interrogative engagement and comes across more as an undergraduate’s fanzine than as a ‘biannual journal of writing and art’. There’s nothing wrong with ‘zine culture, of course – it can produce unique writers. But Extempore’s need to authenticate itself by ‘publishing seriously’ has it sitting uncomfortably, unsure of itself.