Matthew Reed Baker takes over the 33 1/3 blog this week with a deep-dive into his upcoming addition to the Genre series: 1970s Jazz Fusion. Today Matthew shares some of the challenges (and opportunities) he faced in writing his 33 1/3 book.
by Matthew Reed Baker
Despite the fact that my proposal was accepted, I was deeply insecure about starting the writing.
First and foremost, I know from experience that when you overflow with passion for a subject, that love you have blurs your vision and makes you lose direction—you just want to write about everything all at once!
Even worse, that same passion can make you self-conscious that you’re not expressing yourself with sufficient intelligence and knowledge, and that tension can stifle the freedom of your writing. The first problem wasn’t too hard to solve, thanks to extensive outlining of each chapter and proper discipline to stay within my planned, workable structures. The latter problem nearly crippled me.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, I am the proud, happy owner of a library of jazz books, penned by some of the greatest music writers and scholars, many of whom have devoted their whole careers to studying and analyzing jazz.
Even though I have spent nearly my whole life listening and educating myself about jazz, I felt rather intimidated that I was now adding to a canon of literature that I respect so much.
I am used to writing on deadline, so I knew I had to get started as soon as possible. But when I dove in to writing my introduction, I found that I kept wanting to research more, to include more information to show that I really, really knew my stuff—after the all, the introduction would be my whole statement of purpose—it had to be definitive, right?
Instead, it was coming out so dense and directionless, that I could barely read it myself. This impasse was completely discouraging, especially since it lasted a few weeks.
And then a bolt of inspiration came out of the electronic ether that completely changed my game.
I have always followed my favorite music writers on social media, one of them being the legendary critic Ann Powers. It was December 2023, and she posted on Twitter that she was reading the proofs of a book she was writing on Joni Mitchell, and how she was super aware that there would be nitpicky readers out there ready to dismantle every argument she says in the book. (That book, called Traveling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell, came out the following year to wide international acclaim.)
I responded that I just signed a contract to write my book, and I was having the same worries even at the start of writing. Her answer: “Mazel Tov! And no one will know your subject in exactly the way you do!”
Now I have never met Ann Powers and don’t know her personally at all, and this may sound like simple advice, but her words inspired me and freed me to stop thinking about making something definitive to impress people.
Instead, I realized the opportunity to write this book was a gift, and that having my own base of knowledge and writing voice could be a gift too.
In short, her advice just made me think: Don’t belabor things, just listen to the music, study it, but then write about it with the same happy abandon with which I did the chapter sample in the proposal. After all, that happy abandon earned me the opportunity in the first place. Thank you, Ann Powers!
And the best decision I made after that was scrapping the introduction I wrote, and instead diving in with the first chapter on Miles Davis. It was such a joy to tell his story and appraise his albums through my filter that I just got into a humming flow of words and information and I did that again and again, chapter after chapter.
In fact, my final version of the introduction was the last thing I wrote for the book—by now, I knew my voice and my approach, and the result was vastly better than my failed first attempt.
After that, another challenge is that jazz fusion is a genre that is almost impossible to define.
I make an attempt early on in the book, where I discuss electric amplification and certain musical trends and structures, but setting the parameters remained difficult. Jazz fusion, of course, is a genre that takes jazz and meshes it with rock or funk or soul or electronics, or all of them at once. Then this musical stew can also feature elements of Latin music, Indian music, classical music, musique concrète, you name it.
To reflect the genre’s eclecticism in this book I wanted to write, I do occasionally stretch the limits of what is considered jazz fusion, so that I could include some artists or highlight some specific albums that were too important for me to omit.
Which also led to the most intractable challenge of all: how to keep my book from being too encyclopedic. I wanted to write about too many artists, and then I wanted to survey every single album by each artist.
Leaving some favorite artists out was painful, but necessary. Much more painful was bringing my manuscript back down to size: My first draft was so long, I had to cut 15,000 words before I submitted it!
Such cuts, however, truly made it a much better book, one that is more enjoyable to read and that I hope lets these geniuses breathe on the page. It was yet another reminder that challenges can actually be benefits, and that writing never feels better than when you’re surmounting them.
Matthew Reed Baker
has been a writer and editor for almost three decades. He was the research and arts editor at Boston Magazine for 14 years, where he is still a contributing editor, and has written for The Boston Globe Magazine, ForbesLife, and National Journal. He lives with his wife, two children, and their cat in the Boston area and Midcoast Maine.
1970s Jazz Fusion is available to buy in bookshops and online, including at Bloomsbury.com.
