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!