Confessions of a Sporadic Reader

When I read a book, I often take a sideways look at the location of the bookmark.

"Gee, I'm nearly halfway done!"

And I feel a surge of pride every time I actually finish a book. Not that every book you pick up has to be read cover to cover. Far from it.

For example, Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century  is a collection of pieces he wrote about jazz over the course of a decade and more. Thumbing through the pages and index, I was pleased to see that I recognized some of the "younger" artists he was writing about. It's hard to keep up with that field, in which every innovation seems to involve some sort of fusion that results in a bastardization. In the course of his analyses, Chinen makes some useful distinctions between musical generations, and he classifies the artists whom I consider youngsters together to form a "new elder statemen" category. I'm thinking here of Greg Osby, Nicholas Payton, James Carter, Roy Hargrove.( I missed the Wynton Marsalis era entirely.)

As I write these words I'm listening to the first track of Kamasi Washington's 3-CD extravaganza, The Epic. It's called "Change of the Guard," but to me it might just as well have been called "Pharoah Sanders Goes Hollywood," because the core music is mostly good, while the strings-and-vocals background sounds pretty bad. Such vaguely pretentious titles are nothing new to jazz; they stretch from Herbie Hancock's Directions in Music (2001) to Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Stan Kenton's Innovations in Modern Music (1950). Chinen writes:

Washington steered clear of hip-hop beats or electronic production on The Epic, favoring a style more in tune with Alice Coltrane's astral soul jazz. The cover art encouraged this interpretation, depicting the tenor saxophonist against a sci-fi backdrop of interplanetary alignment, a cosmic medallion resting on his chest. It was no wonder so many people mentioned him in the same breath as Coltrane, whose late-period music vibrated with a questing spirituality, and Sanders, who extended that agenda for the Aquarian age.

Chinen discusses Washington's youth in LA and the role played by his father, Rickey, an underappreciated jazz musician, in his career and recording choices. Such information may be well-known to those who have followed the music but it was all new to me, and though it's biographical rather than musicological for the most part, it gives me the patience to settle back and appreciate the music.

I also read Chinen's lengthy essay about pianist Brad Mehldau with interest, it part because Mehldau has always irritated me and I was hoping Chinen's analysis would help me understand why. It didn't. Then again, Chinen's  interest lies more in the twists and turns that jazz culture has taken than in individual stylistic peccadilloes.

A second book with a quirky cover that I dipped into recently was Bitwise: A Life in Code by David Auerbach. The author is a computer engineer, and he grew up with the industry, though his perspective is slightly removed from that of "present at the creation" memoirs. Some of the interest lies in insider computer tales, but Auerbach, who went to grad school in literature before switching fields, does a pretty good job explaining where binary metaphors can be useful in understanding the wider world of human emotions, and also where their limits lie. In fact, he has ideas about all sorts of things, and he delivers them in a forceful but not entirely arrogant way. For example:

So it is with audio. where audiophiles insist that no digital process can quite replicate the experience of listening to the analog performance of a vinyl record channeled through a diamond-tipped stylus on a turntable, preferably amplified through transistor-free tubes. I do not buy these claims. Whatever differences there are (and there surely some) between records and digital playback, they are capable of being captured within a digital representation ... Audiophiles want to be convinced that they are experiencing more and truer music than the ordinary listener.

If this sounds a little cut and dried, consider that a few pages later Auerbach takes up the question whether or not the word GOD, typed onto a computer screen, constitutes a "representation." It doesn't matter much to most of us, but it's an important question for Orthodox Jews, who are not permitted to erase or desecrate God's name. Does this apply to computer print-outs?

Auerbach goes into a brief but well-reasoned analysis of art, as opposed to representations of art, though he seems to be unaware that there are already well-traveled paths through those woods. For example, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (who was hired to write a lengthy essay on aesthetics for the Encyclopedia Britannica, way back when) held the view that a work of art is an act of thought rather than a thing. The representation, be it a painting or a poem, is merely a vehicle by which the artist attempts to convey his or her expression to a viewer or listener.
 
I've only made it to page 70 of this memoir. Will I keep at it? It's hard to say. But I've gotten enough out of it already to fork over $5.71 (including shipping) to purchase a used hardcover copy online.

One delight of the winter season has been Life in a Northern Town: Cooking, Eating, and Other Adventures Along Lake Superior, by Mary Dougherty. The photos are colorful, the text is crisp and not too bubbly, and three of the recipes have already entered our permanent repertoire, namely the Corn and Smoked Trout Chowder, the Spicy Cauliflower and Potato Soup, and the Chicken Thighs with Asian Flair. And flipping through the pages just now, I spotted another likely candidate, the Niçoise Salad in a Jar.

The northern town in question is Bayfield, Wisconsin (or maybe nearby Washburn). Hilary and I were up there hiking the forest trails and taking the ice road out to Madeline Island just a week or two ago. I wish I could make the same claim for another of our favorite cookbooks, The Summer Time Anytime Cookbook, which draws its local color from Santa Monica Beach ... 

I also made my way through at least eight novels in recent months: Ngaio Marsh, Gerbrand Bakker, Willa Cather, Leonardo Sciascia, Tess Hadley. That might be a personal record. I don't know what's gotten into me. Maybe the heavy snowfall?