29 October 2007:
Were it not for my regular updating of my office hours here, you might wonder whether I had completely forgotten about this site. I haven't, though I've also been too busy for the last (yes, really) couple of years to devote it the same attention that other projects required.
I'm writing now because there actually is some confirmed news to report (come back soon for more, soon-to-be firm reportage): my review of Ben Ratliff's new book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound will appear in the 12 November issue of The Nation. You don't have to wait until then, though. Rather than contemplate a walk to the mailbox or a newsstand, you can read the article here.
As always, enjoy…
24 April 2005:
Wow. It’s been a long time since I posted an update here. Most of my web-based time has been devoted to the two other sites I maintain. The former you could easily access by clicking the Music button above. The latter hasn’t been mentioned here ... until now. It’s devoted to my radio show on WHPK-FM here at the university: Ear Candy for Insomniacs. Since I’ve already devoted so much time to making the site pretty and useful, I won’t waste space here saying much about it. Click the name, and you’ll find more information than you need....
Otherwise, I have been keeping myself occupied—conducting a public interview with Harrison Bankhead, Ari Brown, and Jodie Christian at the Hot House last June; participating in the panel discussion “The Impact of Race on Rhythm and Blues” (part of the Illinois Humanities Council’s year-long series of public events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision) last September; participating in another panel discussion, “Trans-Atlantic Fusions: Tracing the History of Jazz,” at the South Shore Cultural Center on 17 October; presenting “What’s Going On: Authorship, Accidents and the Concept Album” at Cornell on 25 October; discussing the legacies of Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson with Geraldine DeHass and Richard Steele on Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty-Eight on 13 January of this year (a RealAudio stream of the broadcast is available here); conducting a public interview with Patricia Barber on 2 March as part of the Chicago Humanities Forum; organizing (with George Lewis) a symposium focused on recording for the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies later that week; serving on the Society for Ethnomusicology Council; attending conferences; doing all manner of work on the university’s Arts Planning Council; performing various and sundry committee work in the department and university at large; teaching classes (syllabi available on the Courses page); supervising graduate students and serving on the radio station’s governing board, among other things. As the quarter enters its final half, I’m looking forward to the summer—when I’ll spend my time expanding a couple of the talks I’ve given over the last couple of years for publication: the aforementioned essay on Marvin Gaye’s album and “The Black Eclectic,” which I presented at UC Berkeley in 2003.
Lastly, my essay “Interpreting Jazz,” a short piece that examines jazz historiography and its lacunae, will be published later this year in African American Music: Chronology, Process and Practice (Routledge), edited by Portia Maultsby and Mellonee Burnim.
25 January 2004:
It’s absolutely amazing how busy I was in my first few months in Chicago, despite the fact that I was not teaching. Learning the ins and outs of my department, the university and the city and planning a symposium for late April (details forthcoming) consumed the bulk of my time. As a result, I have in fact made no progress on Honey-Flavored
Soap. More details on that project will soon be available in the News section of the Music page, which I moved to its new home in October. In the future, all updates on performances and recording projects will show up there rather than here.
In other news, the final version of the jazz and poetry essay, retitled “Always New and Centuries Old,” will be published this summer in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin.
This is going to be a busy quarter for me. I’m teaching two new graduate courses and have a number of speaking engagements between now and mid-April: at Sarah Lawrence College’s Blues People: 40 Years Later; at Jazz Changes, the inaugural symposium for the University of Kansas’s Jazz Studies program; at the ASRC/Society for American Music meeting in Cleveland; and at the University of Illinois’s New Directions in the Study of Improvisation. Hopefully, I’ll see some of you at one or more of those events. And with any luck, exhaustion won’t get the better of me between now and the end of it all....
29
September 2003: In keeping with the serious progress I’m
making on recording, expect later this year to hear the real version of Honey-Flavored
Soap. I’ve
still got a number of technical issues to resolve and a lot a re-recording to
do, but they shouldn’t
delay things too long. In addition, expect to see, as well, the extremely limited
release of a four-song EP tentatively titled AD. Right now, my plan is
to make only about 5 copies of it, though with some external input from the
four people who receive it, there may be a wider release.
Lastly, by the middle of October, the Music
page will be radically transformed. Once in place on a different server, it
will be the location for all information related to my musical projects, those
of the members of the Ann Arbor Noise Collective, and any other miscellaneous
music-related stuff that does not fit the service function of these UofC pages.
The preliminary design and interface look good to me, but there is always tweaking
to be done. Stay tuned.
8
September 2003:
I’m
settling into my new apartment and office in Chicago. And the most exciting
accompaniment for the activity is the newly released, limited edition two-disc
set from Rhino: Allen Toussaint: The Complete Warner Brothers Recordings.
The label is apparently releasing only 2500 copies of the disc, and mine is
numbered 1015, so there are still quite a few other copies out there.
For those who don’t
know anything about Toussaint, he is a somewhat legendary, if not well-known,
New Orleans songwriter, pianist, singer and producer. His arrangements and playing
went a long way toward making Labelle’s
“Lady Marmalade” the driving hit that it was. He’s
also the writer on such seventies chestnuts as “Southern Nights,”
which was, of course, a huge seller for Glen Campbell. The highlight of the
collection, for me, is an unreleased live album, recorded in Philadelphia in
the late 1970s, that includes “Shoo-Ra” and “Brickyard Blues.”
The latter song has been an obsession of mine since I saw Toussaint on the late
1980s/early 1990s show Night Music, which was hosted by David Sanborn
(If ever there were a candidate for DVD presentation, that show would have to
be it). I never could find a recording of the song by him, until now. And the
wait was definitely worth it.