Recycled Goods #51, January 2008, has been posted at Static Multimedia. As I announced earlier, I'm putting this column on the shelf in order to catch up with other things I've been wanting to work on. 2007 was a pretty rough year for me, and I've been struggling to keep up with all the incoming music, let alone the stuff that didn't seek me out that I should have been looking for. I've recently worked up some numbers on the year. One thing I found out is that while the total number of albums I dealt with in 2007 remained about the same, inching up from 1075 to 1099, the amount of old music destined for Recycled Goods dropped from 331 to 222. This does not represent a drop in the industry, although promotion cutbacks have had a small role. It's mostly that I haven't been as aggressive as in the past at searching out things I wanted to write about. (The album count each month managed to hold up, mostly because I've been getting more world music, and have backfilled with a lot of world-flavored jazz.)

I thought it would be nice to break this off at 50 columns, but in trying to clean up I found I had so much I figured I might as well split it in two. So this is the end of the end, mostly leftovers, plus a few recent arrivals I felt like squeezing in. I've always tried to cover everything I got (which may have been one reason I stopped looking so hard), and in the end didn't leave much on the shelves: a pile of recent gospel on Verity, some old Jethro Tull live albums, the daunting Albert Ayler box I still plan to get to some day, a lot of DVDs I never committed to in the first place. (I hear the Jazz Icons series are especially noteworthy. I thought about including them in an "In Series" feature, but just didn't get to it. Maybe later.)

In past January columns I've switched over to a year-end wrap-up. That didn't work out this year, so I figured the least I could do would be to post my year-end list. That's in the Additional Consumer News, although it's already slightly obsolete. Records I've added since sending this in:

• Myra Melford/Mark Dresser/Matt Wilson: Big Picture (Cryptogramophone)
• Slow Poke: At Home (1998, Palmetto)
• Brother Reade: Rap Music (Record Collection)

Melford was known at the time but inadvertently omitted. One more error is that the total record count is 2157, not 2207. The whole set of columns are archived on my website. The artist and compilation indexes count entries, so adding them up should be right.

I'm already having some remorse over giving this up, especially as I look through the year-end lists and see things I wish I could get. At some point I hope to get another column going, and I fancy that I'll have time for some freelance work. In the meantime I'll do occasional reports here on the blog, or maybe slip some extras into Jazz Prospecting.