I can’t resist a slightly snotty chal­lenge, espe­cially when it sets fire to a low-leve itch I’ve been car­ry­ing around for awhile. The Best Music Writ­ing antholo­gies twit­ter feed pointed me towards a read­ing list designed for their new book club, and I was amazed and a bit appalled over the exceed­ingly lim­ited range, which goes from disco to quite fine jazz that would still never star­tle or offend the par­ents of some­one you are dating.

The writ­ing, I’m sure, is high qual­ity, cer­tainly with Dyer and Hajdu. The think­ing, how­ever, is mediocre. Not that the writ­ers of these books have mediocre minds — they wrote what they wanted to because it mat­tered to them — but that the edit­ing of this list, and the edit­ing of the anthol­ogy in gen­eral, is so. Leaf­ing through the lat­est edi­tion, my reac­tion is that there are some inter­est­ing pieces col­lected, but that every­thing is blandly pol­ished and very safe. The range of music reflected in the edit­ing is nar­row and pur­pose­fully lim­ited by a smug view of what’s worth lis­ten­ing to and writ­ing about:

Best Music Writ­ing is a beloved annual anthol­ogy begun in 2000 that cel­e­brates the year in music writ­ing by gath­er­ing writ­ing from essays to Tweets on every sound and style of music from hip-hop to R&B to jazz to pop to blues. It is essen­tial read­ing for any­one who loves great music and accom­plished writ­ing. Scribes of every imag­in­able sort—novelists, poets, jour­nal­ists, musi­cians— are gath­ered to cre­ate a multi-voiced snap­shot of the year in music writ­ing that, like the music it illu­mi­nates, is loud, irrev­er­ent, love­able, odd, and always original.

There’s an inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion between stak­ing out such tiny ter­ri­tory and then claim­ing to gather writ­ing of “every imag­in­able sort,” as if the Anthol­ogy is the Vat­i­can and its views are infal­li­ble. The 2011 edi­tion has two pieces on jazz — noth­ing con­tem­po­rary — and less than a hand­ful on clas­si­cal music, the only con­tem­po­rary thing on a vapid and gim­micky use of twit­ter to crowd-source an opera libretto dis­till opera plots to 140 char­ac­ters. There’s an expected self-consciousness about being aware of what’s cool and hip in pop music, a guar­an­tee that the results will be brit­tle and perishable.

I can’t square the con­tents with record­ings and musi­cal events that made their way through the phys­i­cal and psy­chic land­scape of New York City and music writ­ing dur­ing the last year, includ­ing John Zorn at the opera house and a John Zorn opera (and opera along the Gowanus Canal), Mos Def with the Brook­lyn Phil­har­monic, Tin­der­sticks col­lec­tion of Claire Denis film scores, or the musi­cal and cul­tural qual­ity of music being made by and around Fly­ing Lotus. 2011 also had some excep­tion­ally dar­ing, cre­ative and suc­cess­ful jazz and a mon­u­men­tal archive of the work of Sun Ra that explains how at the roots of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music lie ideas that are simul­ta­ne­ously pop­ulist and at the extreme of the avant-garde. This is all within the range of the main­stream, because the main­stream is a river, not the reac­tive ditch of musi­cal think­ing and writ­ing that gets accepted by edi­tors. I shud­der to think what might be included in the next edi­tion that cov­ers the John Cage centennial.

I read a lot of books about music, many of them on the musi­co­log­i­cal side. That sat­is­fies my con­stant quest to under­stand how to make things work and solve musi­cal prob­lems. But I also read a lot of books because they have good writ­ing about music, about its mean­ing and aesthetic/intellectual/social/historical impor­tance. Per­haps it’s time to put together a list of books, like record­ings, that are essen­tial in how they fur­ther the plea­sure of lov­ing music. Purely out of impulse and per­sonal mem­ory, I would start with these:

• Sonata for Juke­box, Geof­frey O’Brien
• Straight Life, Art Pepper
• Impro­vi­sa­tion, Derek Bailey
• How the Bea­t­les Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, Eli­jah Wald
• The Grey Album, Kevin Young
•  The Sym­phony: A Listener’s Guide, Michael Steinberg

 I espe­cially invite feed­back and com­ments on this post. Orga­niz­ing some kind of read­ing group is inter­est­ing to me, but the time involved is a bit daunt­ing and so I would like to gauge the pos­si­ble level of active par­tic­i­pa­tion, What say you all?

Updated for for­mat­ting and gram­mar, fur­ther updated for cor­rec­tion, cour­tesy of Alex Ross, on the nature of ‘operaplot.’.