Even as a college student who loved jazz biographies but hadn’t quite grasped the mechanics of prose, I could tell that many of the books about John Coltrane left something to be desired. One sentence that sticks in my mind was intended, if I remember correctly, to explain his dental problems: “Coltrane loved hoagies!”

What the selection of Coltrane books lacks in quality it more than makes up in quantity. A search of the Library of Congress catalog yielded no less than 13 books with the legendary saxophonist’s full name in the title. And that can’t be everything, because the same search in Amazon’s books database gives me 3,177 hits.

So, while it’s hard to get excited about yet another Coltrane bio, it is nice to see New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff tackling the subject, because, well, it’s nice to see him tackling just about any subject. The guy’s writing—the way he describes the actual sound of his subject matter—is a model of clarity. His previous book, The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, is as essential as the records he writes about. And, though I have yet to crack open my copy, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound seems as if it is a worthy follow-up.

The one review I’ve read thus far, which calls it a “not-quite” bio, includes Ratliff’s tantalizing critique of a certain portion of Coltrane’s present-day fan base:

“Believe this: there is a type of free-jazz record collector–in fact, after punk, part of an increasingly flourishing breed–who does not necessarily think of Africa when he hears a Coltrane album like Expression [1967]. Having come through punk, Japanese noise, and electro-acoustic improvisation, he may just like it because it sounds extreme and nonnegotiable.”

It’s one thing to like or dislike Coltrane’s noisy late-period stuff, but it’s quite another to appreciate it (just see his piece on Interstellar Space from Jazz: A Critic’s Guide…) and still be able to explain its pitfalls and the pitfalls of the culture that surrounds it. Coltrane tends to attract the true believers, which is one reason I’ve had trouble listening to his music the past few years, but not always those who can deal with the towering figure in an intellectually honest fashion.

Let’s hope this is the final word on Coltrane. Ratliff deserves the honor. Plus, it would be nice to go to the jazz shelf in a bookstore and see some less-explored topics.

Patton Oswalt offered the only substantive bit of political comedy last night at the Black Cat: It’s pointless to riff on George W. Bush and his remaining die-hard supporters, he said, because they have no more credibility than Creed fans. The crowd at the sold-out venue did not seem interested, thank the Lord, in consuming much more Washington humor than that.

Now that I think about it, this version of the Comedians of Comedy show also was rather thin on music bits, too. I mean, yeah, Brian Posehn (pictured) talks about metal-as-concept a lot, and he did do an extended routine about the phrase “party like a rock star.” (Those who still use it without irony, he said, should have to denote which rock star they mean, e.g. Marilyn Manson drinking absinthe and tucking his pee-pee between his legs, or Eddie Van Halen removing his teeth, chugging booze, and reacting in horror to his own Gollum-like image in the mirror.) Posehn also deemed that it’s OK for one heterosexual male to blow another heterosexual male, as long as the blower says SLAYER! during the act.

Side note: Speaking of Creed … the Stapp-free aftermath band, Alter Bridge, is surprisingly better-than-shitty. (All things being relative, of course.)

Though some have studied the finer points of the Washington Times, I mainly know it as the paper that’s home to every bad comic strip in creation. (Fred Basset, Crock, and Funky Winkerbean–who still reads these? I imagine the Times is paying about a nickel to the syndicate.) The paper is also home to a culture blog, and every few weeks or so, when someone figures it might be worth updating, my feedreader reminds me that it exists. Apparently there’s been some squabbling on New York Avenue last week over the Eagles, who have a new album or something, prompting this defiant statement from washingtontimes.com managing editor David Eldridge:

I say you can just get out of the car if you don’t want to hear “Take It to the Limit,” turned up to 11.

I’m not especially interested in having a conversation about the Washington Times–or, Christ, the Eagles. But it does open the door to a discussion about music-in-the-car fights. Leave your stories in the comments.

Manchester Orchestra, like many bands, uses a band name and titles that are completely opposed to reality and/or realism. For one thing, they’re not from Manchester, be it in England or New Hampshire or any other place–they’re from Atlanta. For another, while “Orchestra” implies a large and dense lineup, Manchester Orchestra took the name when they were a trio, and they’ve taken on only two additional members since then. All of that’s fine, since Manchester Orchestra is frankly a pretty eye-catching name regardless of its lack of truth. But I do get lost on the title of their album, I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child. Huh?

That said, the band is pretty great; check out their Web site, where their music immediately begins playing when the page loads. It certainly makes me want to go see them at Rock and Roll Hotel at 7:30pm on Sunday, October 28, with The Annuals and opening act The Never.

But wait! There’s more! Manchester Orchestra and the Annuals are also selling a split 7″ single, one that’s available only at their tour venues–it features each band doing one of the other band’s songs. How’s that for incentive?

Price is $12. Call Rock & Roll Hotel at (202) 388-ROCK for more information.

At least one person took umbrage at my characterization of rock. This didn’t seem to need any unpacking, but perhaps I was wrong. So, I’m going to throw out some names just to be clear…

Chuck Berry (Solos? Check. Preening? Check.)
The Beatles (Solos? Check. Preening? Check.)
Led Zeppelin (Solos? Check. Preening? Check.)
U2 (Solos? Check. Preening? Check.)

Perhaps there’s some super-modest sub-genre of rock music that I’m not aware of, one in which none of the participants ever step up to the mike or wonder how they look in the mirror. But it seems to me that these are pretty universal traits. (Mind you, I love me some solos and preening.)

And while I’m at it, I’d like to take just a tad bit more air out of the rock mythos. Classical doesn’t need my help, but I think that the comparison is a useful one.

So here goes…

Whereas rock culture preaches the evils of capitalism–Do I need to unpack this? If so, just check out the Festival Express scene in which the hippies want the bands to play for free; it’s a pretty typical sentiment–rock bands are basically travelling small businesses. The ones that take risks tend to do better than the ones that don’t.

Orchestras, however, are more tethered to one place and are heavily subsidized. Are there any that make money even when they take risks?

So I ask you: Which would be more appealing to the socialist and which would be more appealing to a free enterprise type?

The Leonard Slatkin era of the National Symphony Orchestra has ended and the Iván Fischer era will begin on November 1st, with three nights of an all-Beethoven program. On a whim, I caught one of the exiting conductor’s final performances, and have to say that I’m glad I saw him before he left. It’s been a number of years since I darkened the door of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. I think the last time I was there was to see the Kronos Quartet performing something from the last hundred years.

What struck me on this evening, with its rather safe program of Schuman, Williams, and Brahms, was that the symphony experience, in general, or the NSO, in particular, had something that hippy-rock and socialist-leaning punk always promises but so seldom delivers: a sense of community. Think about it: rock is all about the individual—the solos, the preening—and an orchestra, by contrast, is an enormous musical entity that is working together as an enormous musical entity—and not a bunch of individuals—to advance the work of the composer. The audience is implicated in this as well. Some of this music is so quiet that if the listeners didn’t sit still and keep their traps shut—you know, sublimate their individuality—the concert wouldn’t be a success.

I’ve been to a number of recent shows, such as Joanna Newsom and Vashti Bunyan, that were quite quiet in parts and those parts were almost always spoiled by the sound of conversations or clanking glass or general shuffling about. Granted, some of this has to do with the alcohol and the setting. And some of it has to do with the price (people take things more seriously when they have to pay a bit more). But some of it has to with the music itself.

Which is just a long-winded way of saying that if you’re not already aware of the NSO’s hipper qualities, you might want to give Fischer a shot.

The “most played songs” function on my off-brand MP3 player doesn’t lie, and what I’m being told these days is that I really like Brad Paisley—his latest album, 5^th Gear, has been getting worked pretty hard for the past two months. I’ve been at something of a loss to explain why. I don’t have much of an affinity for contemporary country—if anything, my attitude toward Kenny Chesney and Sugarland is one of active dislike. Though I confess I became a fellow traveler during the Great Alt-Country Scare of 1997, I’m recovered now, retaining an affection only for a smallish stack of Robbie Fulks and Iris DeMent CDs.

In many ways, Paisley is no different from many of his mainstream country contemporaries—his oeuvre is built on a batch of sentimental ballads, manly roars, and nods to Jesus that help him preserve his NASCAR base. But he studiously avoids anything that smacks of political finger-pointing (there’s not a lot of red state in him) or rock concessions (he’s an Opry boy and has a Marty Stuart-grade obsession with his country forefathers). Paisley is an object lesson in the fine line between canniness and pandering, and because he straddles it effortlessly—not to mention because he’s a consummate showman and shit-hot guitarist–he’s sold seven million records. Don’t let the boyish smirk in that picture up there fool you, though. Crown’s damn heavy.

Paisley writes and sings like a man who knows he has two difficult tasks, each of which he takes deathly seriously (even though being funny is part of doing the job right): He has to please both men and women, and has to sound current and vintage simultaneously. When he botches it, he winds up with hokum like “Online,” a tune about those crazy chatrooms, or “Little Moments,” a tune whose lyric reduces to “she’s dim but I love her.” But an acoustic ballad like “Letter to Me” speaks to his talent for carefully turned, detail-rich country lyric writing. (Strunk and White can teach you a lot about clarity and concision in writing. So can Tom T. Hall.) He sets up a potentially awful conceit—writing a reassuring letter to his teenage self—and while the song is full of buck-up-little-camper verities, he’s also aware of when he’s gone too far. “I wish you’d take a typing class,” he grouses two-thirds of the way through, and the line almost single-handedly reduces the song’s sugar content.

On “I’m Still a Guy” Paisley pitches a fit about metrosexuality, but in his songs he’s still pretty much a tamed man; he’s less likely to get into a drunken bar fight than to clock the dude who copped a feel from his wife at the mall. (The “country” Paisley’s songs occupy isn’t rural so much as exurban; the men in his songs dream of off-roading, but what they do is go shopping with their spouses and fight about putting the toilet seat down.) As with every male country singer from Hank Williams on down, Paisley postures as a guy who’s skeptical about romance: “If Love Was a Plane” makes much of divorce rates. But he’s unapologetic about climbing what you might call the ladder of romantic attainment. On “It Did,” the lyric moves from courtship to marriage to fatherhood—the song’s fist-pumping, hell-yeah moment comes when Paisley sings about the birth of his child.

What this makes him, then, is a poet of the American middle class—he speaks to folks who are affluent enough to have a couple of cars, who care about the schools they send their kids to, who go to church but not as much as they feel they ought to, and who keep their ambitions modest and morally restrained—yes to a hard-drinking fishing trip but no to an affair. Not that he’s especially pious about it. There’s a Jesus song on 5^th Gear, “When We All Get to Heaven,” but it’s immediately preceded by “Bigger Fish to Fry,” as proud an assertion of moral relativism as you’re likely to come by. “All I Wanted Was a Car,” 5^th Gear’s lead track and statement of purpose, is an essay on moderated ambitions, scrimping and saving not to become a country star, but to buy a sedan, and not for any articulated purpose. (Though he explains it helped him find his wife, and at the end of the song he has an SUV and a couple of kids.)

Sexy, huh? Emotionally, it doesn’t exactly get my heart started, either. Intellectually, though, it flicks a switch that forces me to run the song through repeated listens. I think I’ve played it a bazillion times partly because I can’t think of a popular musician today, in any genre, who’s so concerned with making class Topic A. That’s class as distinct from money, or success—I mean class as concern with where you stand in the American matrix. The only other person who springs to mind as having worked this turf with any consistency is Jackson Browne, another class-obsessed songwriter, and it’s been 25 years since he’s written a song that’s approximated relevance. If somebody stepped in to work this turf in the interim, I’d like to hear about it. (Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon both pretty much gave up on this sometime around 1985, I figure.)

I’m not a fan of Browne in the same way I’m not much of a Paisley fan, and all of this may speak more to my personal concerns and obsessions than anybody else’s: I grew up in a family of immigrants for whom assimilation didn’t happen automatically, so I like to hear people talk about struggling to pull it off. But there’s no question that Paisley’s captured the great middle, even if his interests haven’t made him a country titan—his last three albums have cracked the top ten, but 5^th Gear hasn’t gone platinum. Look at the comment thread for the YouTube video of “When I Get Where I’m Going,” a plainspoken duet with Dolly Parton, a you’ll get a sense of Paisley as the great leveler—he’s the man behind America’s new funeral anthem. There’s a play at Americans’ emotions in there, but I can’t hear it as pandering, and anybody who can wipe “Wind Beneath My Wings” off the map is truly doing God’s work.

Maybe I’m setting up a double-standard, but I don’t care: When indie rockers go ethnic and Mediterranean (that means you, Beirut), my gut reaction tends to be skepticism. (I guess I’m slightly more tolerant of Gogol Bordello, because Eugene Hutz is actually, y’know, from another country.) So why am I willing to give hip-hop producer Oh No a total pass for testing out the bouzouki tip? Maybe it’s because Dr. No’s Oxperiment, his “audio tour of Turkish, Lebanese, Greek & Italian psyche funk,” doesn’t purport to be a broad statement about cross-cultural unity (or emotional authenticity, for that matter). He’s merely sticking to a theme and indulging an urge, while managing that urge very closely. The results are unencumbered by over-arching identity issues, and yet the disc still seems to respect its source material deeply. Hip-hop can be good like that.

Springsteen is becoming the Patrick Ewing of rock. The Knicks legend had some great years, but I remember him just as much for all those years, way past his prime, when he played shitty basketball on rickety, worn-out legs. And so it is with the Boss. He released Lucky Town in March 1992, so he’s past his 15th anniversary as a washed-up icon. I just listened to his latest, Magic–a huge misnomer. Just more of that bland, crowded-stage sound, with Springsteen trying to yell something inspirational above all the racket. Sure, he’s still good in the big venue, blasting out the old anthems to baby boomers in bandanas. But when it comes to his post-glory-days stuff, best to combine it all in a medley, combining a trip to Youngstown, cable TV, 9/11, and something from this latest release.

Sean Jones, a gifted trumpeter who’s on his way up in the jazz world (I wrote about him when he played the Ellington Festival), has released a new disc called Kaleidoscope. As its name suggests, the music is pretty diverse, and even features several different lineups of musicians. But the title was apparently an afterthought: Jones wasn’t trying to make a cohesive statement with this album. Rather, to hear him tell it, he was trying to build a set of stand-alone tracks for the iTunes era.

What I can’t decide is, does this make Jones a visionary or a cynic? Or both? Is this some razor-sharp commentary (intentional or no) on the state of the music industry, or has Jones got his eye on the future, when albums aren’t unified works of art but prepackaged collections of 99-cents-a-pop hits? It’s often said lately that the focus in the business has returned to singles, but does this mean that the “album” is becoming just a convenient place to compile one’s singles, without worrying about whether the tracks actually have any connection to each other?

Any thoughts?