New Conversations

One of the main reasons I started Inverted Garden was to be part of a conversation. I'd written quite a few articles for other jazz websites, and while I had readers, I never got any feedback. I was tired of howling into the void.

Last week, the conversation came to Inverted Garden in a very real way. WBGO’s Josh Jackson linked to my Pandora post via his twitter feed. Andrew Durkin, the leader of the ribald West Coast big band Industrial Jazz Group, posted an excellent follow-up to my Pandora riff, extolling the virtues of hard-work-musical-discovery and concluding with a perceptive observation on why services like Pandora exist:

Pandora…would not be springing up if there was not exponentially more music in the world these days. It's a response to what Alvin Toffler called "overchoice" -- the dizzying array of new releases in any given week, month, year. So I get it, but I still avoid it.

Durkin also plugged my post on his blog, Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, which I’ve added to “the conversation.” (The Belgian writer Georges Simenon once said, “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” If both Simenon and Durkin are right, then writing about jazz seems a deeply depressing endeavor.)

Jazz scribe Cicily Janus also found Inverted Garden, commenting on an old post, “Cool Talk,” and writing some kind words about my work on her blog, Writing About You (now part of "the conversation"). Janus has a book on the current jazz scene coming out next year—a very welcome addition to a marketplace dominated by histories and biographies.

Comments

[Cicily Janus]

thanks for the mention Eric. I think the whole writing profession quote from George is hilarious. Sure, just about every writer I know (and that's LOTS of them), at least on the surface, has some kind of tortured muse within that was the result of either a) their childhood, b) their parents and what they did to them during their childhood, c) OCD, Manic Depression and or some other psych disorder, and this includes post partum depression and depression even in the most basic sense of the word or d) the love for words.

Mostly D.

But writing about jazz is hardly depressing (yes Eric, I know you or rather hope you said this in jest). I found, through the particular endeavor of writing about living jazz musicians, this occupation/art to be quite an enjoyable, inspiring and sometimes rather curious sort of sport.

Today's jazz musicians are great people for the most part and have tons to tell the world whether it's through their music of their mouths. So carry on, you're doing a great job of continuing the conversation. I'm glad to be a part of it.

Yours,

C