Who Gets the Book?
This month’s musings were prompted by the arrival of a new book, Phil Freeman’s Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, and word of two others that are due to be published later in 2022, a biography of Bill Frisell by Irish journalist Philip Watson and a memoir by Henry Threadgill. You’ll read more about all three of these books in future issues of JazzTimes; I’m just using them here as a platform for arguably pointless but enjoyable speculation. Freeman’s book—much like Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (2018), which covers much of the same time period and some of the same topics—has an episodic structure. Vijay Iyer gets a chapter, followed by a chapter on Taylor Ho Bynum. There’s a chapter on Shabaka Hutchings, and one on…