TEARS IN RAIN

Today, someone I follow on Twitter posted, "My music writing bibliography is over 12 pages long." I thought about whether I could even catalog my own writing about music, and soon realized it would be utterly impossible.

I started writing about music for money in 1996. I've written literally hundreds of album reviews, maybe (hell, almost certainly) thousands at this point, for dozens of outlets, both print and online. Several of the websites I've written for (music.com, paperthinwalls.com, metaledgemag.com) are gone now. The metal blog I ran for MSN in 2009 and 2010 (Adrien Begrand runs it now, and does a great job) switched hosts after its first eight or nine months of existence, and in the transition, a lot of posts were lost, permanently deleted. I had a blog before this one which is long gone.

Some of the magazines I've written for don't exist anymore, either. Does anybody remember Oneworld, Russell Simmons' attempt to create his own Vibe? How about the US version of Metal Hammer that only lasted six months? I wrote for both, as well as tiny zines - Carpe Noctem, Subliminal Tattoos - now long dead. And I've got tearsheets of some of that stuff, but not all of it. I don't have copies of anything I wrote for Magnet or Cowbell. And even in the cases of magazines that I currently write for - Alternative Press, The Wire, Jazziz - my archives are far from complete. Not only do I not have tearsheets or moldering stacks of back issues, I can't even access the original manuscripts, as a lot of them were written with WordPerfect and saved to floppy discs which I threw away years ago. Vast swaths of my output - years' worth of work, hundreds of thousands if not millions of words - are totally inaccessible to me.

And yet...I don't care, not really. I'm much more concerned with the next thing I'm going to write than whatever I've already turned in (and been paid for). Even if I could somehow access all the words I've ever typed, I wouldn't re-read them. Sometimes I'll get a press release that includes a quote from a review, un-bylined, and I'll think, "That sounds like something I wrote." But if I can't go back and check, does it even matter?

I put together a collection of longish profiles in 2009. I'm proud of all those pieces, and if you'd buy a copy of the book, I'd be happy. I was even giving some thought to gathering the profiles I've written since, but I don't have anywhere close to a book's worth yet, and I'm writing fewer of them now.

Eric Dolphy famously said, "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again." That's how I feel about much of what I've written over the last 15 years. I wrote it, and now it's gone. Time to write some more.

THIS QUARTER IN JAZZIZ

The new issue of Jazziz is out, and it's really good. I'm not just saying that because I write for them, either. There are several articles in this issue that I plan on reading—a profile of violinist Regina Carter (who I wrote about for the Village Voice back in March), one on pianist Orrin Evans, the cover story on David Sanborn (no, seriously), and a piece on Analog Africa, Soundway and some of the other labels currently seeking out and reissuing awesome music from 1970s Africa.

I have a couple of items in the issue, too, of course—a short piece on P.E. Hewitt, a dude who composed, arranged and recorded three albums of pretty impressive small-group jazz back in 1969-72, and whose work has now been boxed up by Now-Again Records; a column looking at four new solo horn albums, some better than others; and a review of Brad Mehldau's much-discussed Highway Rider.

Here's how that last one went:

BRAD MEHLDAU
Highway Rider (Nonesuch)
Brad Mehldau has never been a particularly extroverted pianist. But on the new double disc Highway Rider, he turns his signature introspection into numbing enervation.
Mehldau augments his regular trio with second drummer Matt Chamberlain, saxophonist Joshua Redman and a full orchestra, not to mention the heavy hand of producer Jon Brion, best known for making artsy pop with Fiona Apple and Kanye West. The labor-intensive results offer little more than a pale imitation of 1970s Keith Jarrett—in whose quartet Redman's father Dewey played.
On tracks like "Don't Be Sad" and "The Falcon Will Fly Again," Redman tootles along as Mehldau attempts to bolster the saxophonist's melodic lassitude with baroque indulgence. The latter track features a small choir chanting "la-la-la, la-la-la-la" in its concluding moments, as well as studio dialogue that includes the sounds of a happy child—presumably Mehldau's, as Highway Rider is dedicated to him.
Arrangements shift from solo piano and quintet to duos and trios And two tracks feature just the orchestra, which, ultimately, keeps Highway Rider stuck on the soft shoulder of the road. The string players offer little you couldn't hear over the closing credits of a second-tier romantic drama, leeching sorely needed energy with over-sweetened arrangements. At nearly two hours, this release is simultaneously overstuffed and idea-starved.