|
|
Music: Current count 27128 [27090] rated (+38), 374 [369] unrated (+5).
Fairly ordinary week here. I've mostly been looking for recent jazz beyond what's come in the mail. I don't think there's any non-jazz this week (aside from a Haitian comp that has Jazz in the title). Wound up playing many of the downloads I had been sitting on, including ECM's Peter Erskine (really John Taylor) box, and grabbed some older records while failing to find newer ones. Most turned out to be fairly unremarkable, but I did turn up two A- records fronted by saxophonists I've long enjoyed, one retro and one avant.
I suppose the focus on jazz has been a side effect of starting a project to turn my old Jazz Consumer Guide columns into some sort of, well, I call it Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century: A Consumer Guide. I wrote 26 Jazz Consumer Guide columns for the Village Voice from April 2004 to May 2011 (archived here), self-published a 27th column in December 2011, and had a draft file open for a 28th. I managed to squeeze a little more than 1000 records into those columns, and I've collected all that writing in a Libre Office Writer file -- using default page and style formats it comes to 144 pages. Probably the best way to view it is as a PDF file, so I've set up a page you can use to download it (make sure you check the enable box -- my quick and dirty alternative to a captcha).
The page has a form which asks for some questions before you download. I thought it might be nice to keep a count of how many times the file has been downloaded, and to collect some basic information, but the latter is strictly voluntary. I'm not sure, even, that I'll use any collected email addresses, but they would make it possible to interact more in the future. At 144 pages, the book is far from realizing the ambitions of its title. But I still have a lot more writing I can slide into the manuscript: starting with the 7th column in December 2005 I kept two extra files with extensive working notes ("Prospects" and "Surplus"), covering everything I listened to but didn't include in JCG. After that I posted Jazz Prospecting and Streamnotes, so I've done a fairly good job of covering new jazz from 2004 to present. There are also reviews in Recycled Goods columns from 2003 through 2013, and a few other scattered reviews (in Static Multimedia and the Village Voice).
Thus far I've collected about half of the Prospects/Surplus files, some 330,000 words. Maybe half of that is redundant either with itself or with the published drafts, and what's left needs to be edited more compactly. Still, I expect that when I've done that -- what I call "stage two" -- the manuscript will more than double in size. Then on to "stage three" picking up the post-2011 drafts, which will almost certainly add a like amount.
I'm less sure about "stage four," which involves trying to fill in important albums I missed -- most obviously from 2000-04 but also later. Perhaps that's why I've been focusing more on jazz lately. It's beginning to seem like I may have something tangible to show for what in recent years has often felt like a colossal waste of time.
Not that I'm looking for sheer bulk, but any attempt to cover even just the highlights of jazz records since 2000 is bound to be massive: a quick check of my Music Database shows that I have listings for 9920 jazz albums where my earliest recording or release dats is 2000 or later. Some of those I haven't heard or rated -- about 10% of post-2000 artists (369/3773) -- so I could wind up expanding the current 144 pages by a factor of something like eight (to 1152 pages). I'm not sure I'm up for all that, but the hard part of the job has already been done.
Would appreciate any feedback on the book project.
New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week: