Once I get through the first 100 jazz albums, I will begin the songbook project, which involves commenting on several hundred jazz standards of two types: songs played or sung frequently by jazz musicians and written by people like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and original compositions by working jazz musicians like Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, which have been adopted by other players as standards. I will be looking at the historical resonance of these compositions along with their distinctive qualities. I won't put a finite number on this project, since I have no idea of how many I will end up doing. To qualify for this project, a song must be one of my personal favorites as well as having some continuous history of being played. In a few cases, a song with only one significant recording, or repeated recordings by only one artist, might qualify. Some songs might be favored by singers, with few instrumental versions. That's ok. By the same token, many tunes have rarely if ever been sung. That's fine too. I'll begin by going alphabetically through my itunes library on my laptop. I can alphabetize by the name of the song, so I can see how many versions I have of any given song. Then I'll do the same on my computer at work.

I don't have the encyclopedic knowledge to have heard every version of every song I'll be treating; I'm sure I'll be working from a position of partial knowledge (and partiality). Still, it might be an interesting project, at least for myself.

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It was interesting because the guy who set up my new computer said that [technically] they would only transfer [work] files from my old computer to the new one. Of course, I had to point out that I did in fact use my music files in my work. I am thinking of doing a jazz course for the honors program, if they'll let me. I also have a lot of Flamenco, works based on Lorca's poetry, and musical examples chosen to illustrate certain traditions of medieval music (Spanish cancionero). The larger point is that, where does work end and play begin? Certainly in addition to research and teaching, there is a huge amount of time in having an intellectual life that doesn't relate [directly] to work, but that is necessary for [work] in the larger sense. When I am reading the New York Review of Books or TLS, I am doing [work], even though most of what I read will never find its way directly into a book or article. At any given time I might be spending more time doing [work] that is not writing books and articles or teaching classes. If I never did any work not relevant to teaching and research in the most immediate context, I would not actually be able to do research or teach, because I would be intellectually dead to the world. You really never know where the next idea is going to come from, or whether some scrap of knowledge you gained from some irrelevant reading might become relevant at some point down the stretch.