Thanks to the folks at Wolsak & Wynn and ChiZine for organizing the Toronto debut of The Midnight Games, January 20 at The Round Venue, 152a Augusta Avenue. It was an invaluable chance to read my work for a whole new audience, sharing the evening with fellow author Matt Cahill and musician Kari Maaren.
Response to the book has been gratifying—recently I especially enjoyed doing my first-ever school visit, talking about Midnight Games and the hows and whys of writing—thanks to Karen Weber, at Aldershot High School in Burlington. Amy Kenny interviewed me about The Midnight Games for the Hamilton Spectator —on Halloween no less!—and the Globe and Mail’s Patrick White did an insightful Facebook posting about the book. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that Patrick is my nephew, but he actually managed to nail an important aspect of the book: “I don’t think I’m giving away too much away,” he writes, “in saying that, from now on, every time I drive by Hamilton, I will think less about industrial decay and more about huge, writhing tentacles emanating from the skies over Ivor Wynne.”
Also thanks to Albuquerque, NM writer Mark Weber, whose end-of-year entry on his blog/newsletter Jazz for mostly focused on Wolsak & Wynn’s new edition of The Battle of the Five Spot. Mark, I might mention, is a distinctive American poet, music writer, performer and photographer whose photos and writings about west coast music in the 1970s and 1980s have special value in illuminating the contributions of neglected artists. To accompany his 1982 photo of Ornette Coleman and Prime Time, he writes, “I recently reread The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field (2006, 2014) by David Neil Lee, and distance (50+ years) is ideal for historical perspective. This study endeavors to quantify how the opinions and conventions and peer pressure and the dynamics of right place, right time, came together, for better or worse, and how Ornette withstood the powder keg barrage simply because he truly had something of worth to add to jazz. The ground zero paragraph (among many) in this very good book happens on page 34: ‘The more populist tendencies of hard bop, the art music experiments of Third Stream, and the tempered bebop style of cool jazz were all attempts to forge a jazz identity that could move outside of the influence of Charlie Parker. The idea of a technical development of jazz, onward and upward, was stalled behind a barrier of technique.’”
