Month: September 2022

Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig

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This entry is part 38 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this quite a while after finishing the book. Despite having gotten a decent foundation in classical music theory, and some jazz theory of the sort a young improvisor learns, I never managed to find a good source for horn arrangements. A while back, I was inputting an arrangement I did for jazz quintet and orchestra (meaning classical orchestra), when I realized that I didn’t know much about how one goes about actually doing proper jazz arrangements, especially the kind of classic block chords used in sax soli, horn section arrangements, and stuff like that. Not that …

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Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavić, translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić

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This entry is part 37 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this weeks and weeks after I read it. Well, weeks, anyway. (I read this in August.) The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is a very strange book. I guess I’d sum it up as dueling untrustworthy historical accounts by three sources, one from each of the religions of the book, about the Khazar people. The idea is that the accounts were compiled hundreds of years after whatever actually happened with the Khazars, and those compiled accounts have been translated and edited by a modern scholar. So you have a bunch of points of view, …

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Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure& Folk Magic From Appalachia by Jake Richards

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This entry is part 36 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Backwoods Witchcraft is kind of a memoir of Appalachian folk magic. This is the second book by Richards I’ve given a look. The first—Doctoring the Devil—was more recent, but also not particularly interesting to me: it’s more of a highly organized magical cookbook than a cultural history, and not the sort of thing I was really after.   Unfortunately, Backwoods Witchcraft ends up feeling a bit like a less-well-organized stream-of-consciousness magical …

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Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan

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This entry is part 35 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle.  This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to.  The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …

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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

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This entry is part 34 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this at some point weeks after reading the book. This one, I was happy to run across by chance in as an available ebook on the National Library website.  Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is a multigenerational memoir of her family’s experiences—of the history of Vietnam (both during the colonial era and the Vietnam War)—and of their emigration to America, and how the past reverberates through the present, how the further past reverberates through the more recent past.  It’s pretty inspiring that she decided to learn how to draw comics in order to write …

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