Microgroove: Forays into Other Music

by John Corbett

Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience, is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, P.J. Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann; and among other topics, he discusses recording formats, investigates the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry, and with Terri Kapsalis, analyzes the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to “other” music, and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Jazz, Art

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2015

About the author

John Corbett is a writer, curator, and producer based in Chicago. He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery. Corbett is the author of several books, including Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke U. Press, 1994), Microgroove: Forays into Other Music (Duke, 2015), A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (Duke, 2017), and Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (University of Chicago, 2019). As an essayist and reviewer, Corbett has written for numerous academic and commercial publications, including DownBeat, The Wire, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, NKA, Bomb, LitHub, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Corbett has edited or co-edited many books, including several on the musicians Sun Ra and Peter Brötzmann, as well as the 125 books and catalogs that his gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, has produced, and he has contributed to major museum monographs on artists including Jim Lutes, Charline Von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and Sadie Benning, and essays on artists Rachel Harrison for the Art Institute of Chicago and Bob Thompson for the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Corbett’s work as a music producer includes his label, the Unheard Music Series, which existed from 1999-2006, and Corbett vs. Dempsey, an ongoing label issuing CDs of new and historical jazz, experimental music and improvised music. In 2002, Corbett was invited to be guest artistic director of JazzFest Berlin, and he co-produced the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music as well as a weekly series of concerts at the club of the same name. He has organized many musical events and festivals, most recently a series at the Art Institute of Chicago and stand-alone events at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, NYC, and the Menil Collection, Houston. As a curator, Corbett has been involved in many exhibitions at museums including the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago, 2016), the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980), Sullivan Galleries, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago (Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence, 2010), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 2009). Corbett taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1988 to 2014.

Reviews

[Jeff McLennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Corbett is a master of his craft - that sometimes, for me, is the problem. He is sometimes waaaay too academic for my mind to wrap around. His incredibly detailed and vocabulary bursting essays can be too wordy (for me) and as a result they can lose me as a reader. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have informative things to say about improvisation, executes in depth interviews with a who’s who of music, or that his varied approach insofar as genres of music ..goes unnoticed. I ate this book up - and I would highly recommend it anyone wanting to take a bite out of understanding some of the heavy hitters in contemporary music - I just wish it was a little more loose.

Standout sections: The philosophical interview with Ornette Coleman. The expose’ on Sun Ra and the implication of Saturn’s artwork. The last piece about the speculated ( and comical) origins of improvisational music as it relates with prehistoric man or woman.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could go on reading Corbett daily for the rest of my life. This is largely interviews, but they are with musicians not of the accessible stripe, and Corbett a) knows how to pick 'em; b) knows how to engage them; and c) knows how to question them in order to force them to clarify their ideas. When the pieces are in essay form, he writes with energy, passion, playfulness, and immense knowledge of the world of improvised music.

[Chris Dadge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only slightly less amazing than Extended Play.

[Duke Press]

"Corbett has just published a terrific new anthology of his writing called Microgroove, the long delayed follow up to his 1994 book Extended Play. . . . There's a lot of great stuff in the new book—which went through multiple iterations over the years, scrapped and revisited several times—but in his introduction to a piece called 'Twenty Seven Enthusiasms: A Spontaneous Listening Session,' Corbett expresses a major part of what makes his work so special. 'Show and tell was always my favorite part of school,' he writes, eventually explaining that 'you accumulate things not to own them, but to share them.' It's what he's done as a writer, a music presenter, and, in recent years, a gallerist, at Corbett vs. Dempsey." — Peter Margasak The Chicago Reader Included preview of his events.
10/02/2015

"One of the more interesting features of Microgroove is the inclusion of multiple pieces on some of the artists. This allows Corbett to consider them from different angles or over time, providing a fuller picture of their art in the process. That, combined with the eclectic scope of Corbett’s interests, makes of Microgroove a rich, multifaceted survey of some of the more challenging artists of the last two decades." — Daniel Barbiero Avant Music News
10/27/2015

"The far ranging scope of the 53 essays and interviews collected in these nearly 500 pages, dating from 1993 to just last year, reminds us that even within music’s commercially neglected fringes complex gradations of sub genre exist, separating the hardcore avant garde devotee from one who thinks they’re down because they own a copy of Space Is the Place. ... But first and foremost [Corbett] is a devotee of challenging and outré sounds, and his essays are most compelling when he dives headfirst into his chronicles with a fan’s enthusiasm and verve. ...These pieces beautifully balance serious musical scholarship and critical analysis with the kind of collar grabbing, “give this a listen” excitement that draws us all to music in the first place." — Matt R. Lohr Jazz Times
10/28/2015

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

(7/27) From the Introduction:

... [Derek Bailey] told me that he couldn't imagine any reason that a person would come hear him play unless they were attracted to the sound of what he did. Wow, I thought, you've got to be pretty deep down the rabbit hole to find that sound attractive.

That's an interesting take on this music. I've increasingly found that I have to be attracted to the timbre of the sounds before I can be totally engaged with the rest of the goings-on. I did find Bailey's guitar sound attractive, from as far back as I could remember, probably in duet with Evan Parker's twisty, spooling soprano sax. And more recently, Martin Kuchen's baritone sax, Pascal Battus and Dafne Vicente-Sandoval's raspy sandpaper-y duets, Jeremiah Cymerman's Pale Horse trio, Nashaz by the Berlin/Lebanon quartet of Neumann/Sehnaoui/Thieke/Vorfeld, and the electronics of Marc Kate, Bagdassarian/Baltschun/Beins, and Choi/Drumm/Hong. What pulls me in immediately are the attractive surfaces of the sounds; then I look for the connections. I guess I've already been deep in the rabbit hole for years...

Update: the interviews are great, the essays can be hit and miss.

[dimwig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I HAD LOTS OF FUN READING THIS BOOK

i mean i don't know what else to say it's very affirming stuff re lots of stuff i care v deeply about specifically IMPROVISATION also eclecticism, interesting to mix interviews and magazine articles and reflective/exploratory musings with random bits of more academic stuff re use of female orgasm in pop music & orientalism in american experimental composition.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly of interest for those interested in free jazz/improv although Corbett writes about other types of music. I especially enjoyed an interview of Corbett on his record-collecting passion.

[Mills College Library]

780.904 C789m 2015