Posted in Books on Nov 17th, 2007
Several months ago, around the time we launched this new site, I began to draft a post about a book that influenced me in my youth, as the saying goes. It was summer, I was 21 years old, and I was working in a restaurant by day and spending my nights drinking in a rather aimless manner, drifting along in a rather aimless relationship. I’d dropped out of college the year before. Bored and restless, a friend and I headed west to Seattle, planning to hitch-hike along the Alaskan Highway and land jobs in the…
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Posted in Books, Jazz Notes on Oct 30th, 2007
That’s my way of preparation–to not be prepared. And that takes a lot of preparation!–alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, from the new book Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art. You can read an online excerpt here.
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Posted in Books on Oct 26th, 2007
For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the Raintree County Atlas is always fixed at nine o’clock, and it is summer and the days are long.—Ross Lockridge Jr.
The raintree is no longer there, in the Bloomington backyard near the garage where a 33-year-old author’s life ended just as his first novel was topping the New York Times bestseller list. There are other trees that tower over the gray-blue colonial house, as well as the garage and the small cottage that border the alley; in the summertime they wrap everything in shadows. His children planted the raintree after he was gone, and for a few years it thrived, showering the ground with golden blossoms every June…
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Posted in Books, Jazz Notes on Oct 17th, 2007
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music professor Phil Ford, heard recently on our Night Lights program Jazz and Jack Kerouac, will be giving a talk this Friday (Oct. 19) on private acetate recordings that Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, and Allen Ginsberg made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I’ve had occasion to hear a brief bit of one of the acetates, which featured Keroauc, Holmes, and Seymour Wise doing scat/bop vocalese accompaniment…
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Posted in Books, Jazz Notes on Oct 9th, 2007
Word has come via Mosaic Records that pianist Jack Wilson has passed away. Wilson’s best-known albums were two 1960s Blue Note dates, Easterly Winds (featuring the hardbop dynamic duo of Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan and Something Personal. He’s also present and accounted for on several…
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Posted in Books on Sep 4th, 2007
All the talk last week about Jack Kerouac, as well as the name of an interesting new blog, sent me back to Who Walk in Darkness, a novel published in 1952 by Chandler Brossard. Brossard’s book is a study of downtown Manhattan hip circa 1948…albeit a study of a somewhat better-dressed, better-fed crowd than, say, the denizens who inhabit William Burroughs’ Junky…
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Posted in Books on Aug 18th, 2007
Hot on the heels of Jack Kerouac’s entry into the Library of America comes news that the “scroll” version of his most famous book is going to be published. I actually got to see some of the scroll–which is 120 feet long–several years ago…
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Posted in Books, Jazz Notes on Aug 9th, 2007
A few days ago I posted a list of jazz biographies and books that some fans are eagerly awaiting. (Right now I’ll add another–as well as the appended Bob Porter book on soul-jazz–volume two of Gary Giddins’ Bing Crosby bio.) Well, here’s some background on why it’s rough going these days…
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