Okay, I’m basically going to demonstrate by example here. I’ve noticed recently that a certain website has started billing my guest-with-house-trio residency as an “award-winning quartet”. It’s very flattering and no doubt rather good for business, but I do feel I should set the record straight.
Many of the soloists have indeed won awards and my drummer has too. And the bassist and I aren’t slouches – we have a few swimming certificates and things between us. Perhaps we all deserve knighthoods anyway for being so wonderful… But the implication that we are an established quartet with the soloist and have won awards as such is going too far.
Obviously on the press side it can be rather difficult to crunch down often complicated scenarios into a handful of punchy words. And it’s great that people do their best to present what you do in a glowing light. It’s really nice that they actually want to. After all, they don’t have to…
But it really is a duty to clarify things like this – passive dishonesty is still dishonesty. In short, I think we should be as rigorous about correcting flattering mistakes as we are about correcting unflattering ones. Sometimes people mangle you in a nice way (but it’s still mangling…)
Jason Lyon on Music 
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