This is not a blog...

...in content; it is rather a way to work on studies of 12 musicians online, using the blog format in ways that make that usually private process public and potentially interactive (with its RSS feed, comments section, and archives).

Here is a progress report I published in the Spring 2013 issue of the newsletter for the International Society of Improvised Music. This blog will chart the progress post-that report.

This study is primarily my way of learning about things new to me, and of writing them up in new ways--much more so than a demonstration of expertise in the subject or mastery of the exposition. It is a quixotic adventure beyond what I've done as scholar/critic/journalist of music, and the only hope for any wisdom from it at this point is for me to persist in its folly.

At this point, the Contents, Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 15 are all more or less finished. The rest are roughed out in various degrees of detail, with links to some interviews and CD reviews that will inform them. (Chapters 4-8 have been roughed out much more completely than I can post here, because I had to combine and condense them into one 10K-word chapter for publication in an anthology for Duke University Press; both the long and short versions are too close to the text now in press there for me to post here. Once they're published, I expect to get permission to reprint them here in my expanded drafts, but that won't be until some time in 2015.)

I chip away at it when I can, around my paying work, which fluctuates. It may lie fallow for weeks or months, then suddenly move to the center of my plate for awhile and spawn a run of new entries, then recede, and so on. It looms before me like a big patch of overgrown acreage that I have to weed and plant and turn into an orderly garden...but it is not infinite, not as sisyphean as it feels and looks; I’ve tamed such intellectual overgrowth before, and will proceed in the faith that I can do so again.

I’ve been collecting CDs and written material by and about these artists for half a dozen years; another half-dozen to write it all up in the way that I want will add up to a year devoted to each artist, which strikes me as about right. I have folders full of rough notes on them. I’ve transcribed interviews with most of them, published reviews of some of their CDs, and given presentations about some of them at academic conferences.

What the blog structure here does is put all that work together under one umbrella, give each of them a page of their own with links to my previous work on them, and give me a space to add to it--more CD reviews, mostly, mixes of notes and near-finished prose, and eventually drafts of something like summary chapters on each, overviewing his or her body of work for the points of interest to my overarching project--some biography, some meditations on his or her aesthetics, and on their connections with each other within the broader musical/cultural contexts and sociohistorical currents they and I swim in.

Those chapters, once done, will likely add up to something like a book-length survey of musicians linked by their variations on Asian-diasporic and Asian-American identity, history, aesthetics, themes, albeit short of a comprehensive survey of such things. I may even decide to publish it as such, depending on the final results--but such a book is not the end in my sights. Once the music study is standing alone as itself, as something of some practical use to the artists, I will then proceed to cannibalize it for parts to weave into a larger work of speculative fiction.

My fiction's conceit: to create a quasi-plausible alternate history that looks like what I wish the world had become since 1948 (when I was born)--politically, socially, economically, culturally, personally--rather than what it has done. Part of that includes a greater understanding, respect, and celebration of the music and musicians of my focus by said world, a shift of their work and personae from margins to center (or, sometimes, from center to cutting edges) in the general scheme of things.

For awhile, it made sense to chip away at this part of my project in the more professional kind of “publicly” (the CD reviews in online and print journals, the conference presentations). At this point, though, I’m far and deep enough into it that it makes more sense to do it on my own timeline and unconstrained by editors and deadlines--to write by my own lights alone, at my own pace--while also mitigating the edge and hazards of total isolation with the blog’s interactive platform.

Not that I’m counting on or needing anyone to actually respond to or participate in it with me. Still, just the social-media feel of doing it gives me that feeling of being watched, expected to follow through, and the organization makes it easier to do so.

I have no interest in doing anything short of this--journalism or scholarship for little niches of readers that pass in the night and fade to black--although I also have no certainty of pulling this one off. However, much has been done in private so far, most of which won't appear here but which also drives "here" forward, like an iceberg its tip toward the Titanic...

The payoff for me, once the chapters listed here are done, will be to move to the next phase, of weaving the scholarly true together with the creatively imagined. But if I die, or fail to finish for some reason, whatever does get done here may serve the artists, as far as such things do (I've kept them on hold while working on the fiction part, which is pretty far along now too...some 92K+ words, reader...but again, that part stays in its ocean for now, now that its mass is critical enough to push this part along...).