David Foster Wallace, the writer who reinvigorated the long-essay form to depict the wide, strange breadth of modern life, and who created a landmark in contemporary American fiction with his novel Infinite Jest, has died at the age of 46. He committed suicide Friday night at his home in California. Wallace was a favorite of many young musicians and writers that I know, and some tributes have already appeared in the jazz blogosphere…

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43 years ago J.D. Salinger, the reclusive writer who rose to cult status in the 1950s and early 1960s on the strength of his novel The Catcher in the Rye and his stories about the talented but troubled Glass family, bade farewell to the published literary life with a long piece of fiction titled Hapworth 16, 1924. It appeared in the New Yorker in June of 1965 and elicited little critical or commercial fanfare; the Salinger media mania that accompanied the publication of his book Franny and Zooey in 1961 had almost completely subsided. Now it appears that “Hapworth” may be coming out in book form next January.

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Richard Twardzik, the rather haunted-looking pianist who was a mainstay of the Boston jazz scene in the early 1950s, recorded only once as a leader before dying at the age of 24 during a European tour with Chet Baker. His quirky, fluid style, influenced by Bud Powell and Art Tatum and sprinkled with touches of dissonance and classical music, has led some to compare him to fellow 1950s iconoclasts Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Now Bouncin’ With Bartok, a long-awaited study of pianist’s life and recordings written by Jack Chambers…

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Novelist Nelson Algren and singer Billie Holiday are two iconic figures of mid-20th-century American culture, though Holiday’s name and visage–not to mention her voice–is surely better-known and remembered than Algren’s is today. (At least Starbucks hasn’t taken to hawking copies of The Man With the Golden Arm at the coffee counter yet.) Algren, perhaps, made the mistake of living too long and fading into relative obscurity before his death in 1981.

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Brian Morton, co-author (along with the late Richard Cook) of numerous editions of the Penguin Guide to Jazz, will be publishing a biography of multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy in June 2009. Dolphy died from diabetic complications at the age of 36 in Berlin in 1964; as well as being an invaluable part of groups led by Chico Hamilton, John Coltrane…

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(Note: the extended audio version above includes an interview with Ray Boomhower and clips of Robert Kennedy speaking during the 1968 campaign)
“Indiana can help choose a president.” Those words, which may have a surprising relevance this year, were used by Senator Robert Kennedy to open speeches when he launched his campaign for the presidency in Indiana. In his new book, Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary, Ray Boomhower provides the inside stories…

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Around this joint we are big fans of the jazz writer Larry Kart and his book, Jazz in Search of Itself. As I’ve noted in our store section, Kart, who worked at Downbeat and was a longtime reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, “is not just a good critic–he’s a very good writer, whether he’s discussing Wynton Marsalis and the so-called ‘neocon’ musicians, Lennie Tristano…

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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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