Reflectory Updates

 

I’m sorry I missed last month’s posting. I was working

round the clock to get a new ebook draft completed and

got completely caught up with it that weekend. Then it

turned out I couldn’t post it because my publisher, Lulu,

requires very strict and tricky formatting and I screwed it

up. Over the last few weeks I’ve been tediously

comparing the old and new versions. But good news: I’m

almost done, it's better than it was before, and it should

be posted soon as the new and improved Revised Edition.

I want to thank all of you who have purchased my Adams

biography. I just hit the 100-sale mark, and that seems

pretty good considering my marketing campaign thus far

has been strictly grassroots and word-to-mouth. I’ve heard

some very kind things about the book from people I respect,

though I’ve gotten a few surprising criticisms. Two stick out.

One is that they object to my reverse-chronological approach

to the second half. They favor the conventional birth-to-death

progression. Gosh, don't they watch movies? Aren’t

flashbacks and retrospective narratives rather common?

Frankly, after writing the first half, I was looking for something

different to do with the storytelling. I welcomed the challenge

to render it this way.

The other objection I’ve heard, albeit only once but in a

forthcoming review, is my penchant for writing asides.

Admittedly, after 37 years of work and thought about jazz, I

had a lot to say. I was after a contextualized, sociohistorical

account of Pepper’s life. Two sections I wrote but eventually

deleted

(https://www.pepperadams.com/Detroitjazz1922-1954.pdf and

(https://www.pepperadams.com/Detroitjazz1922-1954.pdf, were too off-topic so I parked them at pepperadams.com. And three times I entitled sections as Interludes to in some

way separate it from Pepper’s life story, but, again, to add

more depth. In all cases I tried to make the book move

ahead quickly. Oh well. As they say, you can’t please

everyone.

Some are waiting for the book to be released in hardcover

and paperback. I have a publisher that is considering the

book for publication, and I should know in the next month or

so whether it will be out this way, maybe even in time for

Christmas. As expected, I will have to scale down the book’s

length considerably, and it will not include any music links

nor nearly as many photographs. The hallmark of the ebook

version is its 450 music links, half of which have never seen

the light of day. So, grab the ebook if you dig Pepper’s playing.

Much of the music is quite obscure, and many of the audience

recordings and broadcasts are remarkable!