Posts
Happy New Year! 2022 was a tough year healthwise for me,
dealing with C0V!D and its aftermath. So, I am happy to turn
the page.
Despite the inconvenience, I managed to abridge Reflectory:
The Life and Music of Pepper Adams for a paperback edition. It took four months of work to ready the manuscript for the
publisher, and prepare all of the documents they required to
issue me a contract. Once received, it took additional work to
find photographs and illustrations that SUNY Press would
accept, and then obtain permission forms for them. Then, it
took another few weeks of work to pore over the copyeditor’s
corrections. Now, finally, I’m in the last stage of production. I
recently reread the typeset proofs, proposing final tweaks,
and now it’s up to me to produce the index, a tedious but
curiously engrossing task that will take another two weeks to
complete. Once I submit the tweaks and index, all that’s left for
me to do is to make sure my changes were properly added
and review the index for errors. I think by around February 1
the book will be put to bed.
You can expect an upgraded Thad/Mel chronology (1964—1977) to be posted in the next few months. I recently searched
through eight years of Orkester Journalenmagazines and was able to both find new gigs that Pepper and
Jones/Lewis did and correct some old ones. The current
chronology, that was updated a month or two ago, is here:
https://www.pepperadams.com/Chronology/Thaddeus.pdf
For those who read Swedish or are curious, I also stumbled
upon a 1970 review by Lennart Blomberg that I hadn’t before
seen. It’s newly posted in the bibliography at
https://www.pepperadams.com/index.html :
https://www.pepperadams.com/Bibliography.html
As a reminder, the ebook version will remain in print. That’s the
one with 450 music links, half never before available, and many
cool photographs besides. None of this is included in the
forthcoming paperback.
I hope 2023 is a great year for all of you. I’ll provide an update on
the paperback edition in early February. I’m hopeful that the
project will be in the rearview mirror by then. I also hope to
provide news about newly discovered tapes of Adams and Chet
Baker from 1978.
