Want List follows the exploits of two music fans stationed in different camps—a record collector and a tape trader—whose friendship is predicated on charting a vast network of artists and recording sessions, as well as exchanging the stories that haunt each of their beloved media. A unique form of fact-fiction with nods to classic noir, Want List brims with references to jazz and improvised music rarities (some real, some invented), while touching on deeper questions of love and loss, the phantasmagoria of the archive, and various flavors of freedom.
The debut novel from John Corbett joins a prominent, decades-long body of work in writing, publishing, curating and producing a breadth of projects centered on contemporary art and music. The novel presents his deep research in music to a wide audience, as a work to be both appreciated by jazz and improvisation aficionados and accessible to readers new to the genres.
BONUS:
As a loose sidecar to his novel, John Corbett has produced a Want List double-LP set, which will be sold separately in a limited edition. Some of the tracks on the main characters’ “want lists,” including the Don Cherry Trio recordings of central concern to the narrative, are reproduced on the LPs, many of them for the first time on record.
Side A opens with three legendary tracks waxed by Don Cherry with a trio in 1961 and presumed lost in a fire in the '70s. On Side B, two previously unreleased Peter Brötzmann tracks, both from the revolutionary period at the end of the 1960s, carry their own mythological status: The first recording is from a traumatic television appearance in 1967, when Brötzmann’s free jazz trio was confronted by its mainstream counterparts, the Klaus Doldinger Group. The tracks on Side C come from Sun Ra’s tenure in Chicago in the 1950s; the first is probably the earliest recording of Ra’s signature piece “Saturn.” Want List closes with saxophonist Tommy “Madman” Jones, Phil Seamen, and Mats Gustafsson. All but one of the Jones tracks here focus on his funkier material. Some of these records are unimaginably rare—physical copies of the first cut, his version of “Don’t Explain,” are, as the aerospace engineers used to say, unobtainium. The ultimate track on the record is the only new one, recorded by Mats Gustafsson specifically for this project on the prehistoric stone flute that features in the final moments of the novel.
Stay tuned for more details and ordering info!