Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever

Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever is an in-depth exploration of the music made by two jazz icons, trumpeter Davis and saxophonist Coltrane: the recordings they made both together and separately and the ways each man influenced the other and the world.

Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington
Hardcover; 304 pages
ISBN: 0312327854
Thomas Dunne Books
2008

Sun Ra Reissues Transparency Records

Catering to closet Sun Ra completists the world over, the Transparency label put nearly 60 discs of the Saturnian’s works into circulation this year. The mammoth Detroit box is probably best reserved for true believers (26 hours of music), but the more manageable At the Horseshoe Tavern, 1978 delivers instant pleasures without the perils of indigestion. Also of note, the imprint’s six volume Lost Reel collection excavates concert and rehearsal tapes from a myriad of dates and sources.

I have a long-gestating article on the series that will hopefully drop sometime in early ‘09.

A Power Stronger Than Itself The AACM and American Experimental Music

“Written with the eye of an ethnographer, the ear of a performer, and the heart of a hometown dweller, George Lewis’s account of the development of the AACM is an engaging story, a romance in which several generations of musicians triumph to create a music that travels around the world, yet is completely unique to their experiences. Reinscribing Chicago as a city of enormous artistic vitality and tough aesthetics, A Power Stronger Than Itself brilliantly redraws the map of jazz and widens the horizon for new and experimental music.”
—John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

728 pages, 4 color plates, 71 halftones 6 x 9 © 2008
Cloth $35.00
ISBN: 9780226476957 Published May 2008

Paper $25.00
ISBN: 9780226476964 Published October 2009

E-book from $5.00 to $25.00 (about e-books)
ISBN: 9780226477039

Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue

Steve Dalachinsky and Matthew Shipp

Pianist Matthew Shipp has produced a manifesto of sorts to contextualize the music he makes and the person he is, a venture he mounted with poet and longtime friend Steve Dalachinsky. The transcript of their discussion, some of Shipp's writings, as well as poetry that Dalachinsky wrote while listening to Shipp play constitute a book issued in 2008 by Rogue Art entitled Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue.

This book is not about jazz; it is about how the creation of musical language is inseparable from everything else.

Softcover; 97 pages
ISBN: 978-2-9531508-0-3
Publisher
2008

Nathaniel Mackey: BASS CATHEDRAL

183 pp. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.
Paper, 224pp., $16.95
ISBN 978-0811217200

The Great American Jazz Novel by Nathaniel Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award


Bass Cathedral is Mackey's fourth volume in his ongoing novel with no beginning or end, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie--much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex--Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."

NATHANIEL MACKEY is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism; edits the literary journal Hambone; and is the host of a legendary radio show of jazz and world music in Santa Cruz called "Tanganyika Strut." A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His book Splay Anthem is the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry.

Date of publication: 2008