About the Author

John Corbett is a writer, producer, and curator based in Chicago who has written extensively on jazz and improvised music. A regular contributor to DownBeat magazine, he is the author of several books, including Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein and Microgroove: Forays Into Other Music.

Reviews

"Appropriately, in the aptly titled Pick Up the Pieces, some 85 separate albums and groups are part of the author's own personal excursions, all surging forward at breakneck speed attempting to creatively reflect the times in which they lived and worked, all looking for what rare magic, if any, could come next after the decline and fall of an admittedly unique band and the equally dreamy decade before them. Where to now? That is the schematic blueprint for Corbett's captivating and highly personal musical map. And it works beautifully."--Donald Brackett "Critics at Large"

"Pick Up the Pieces challenges us to attempt an understanding of an era's crazy contradictions and to do so through putting on an album, preferably with friends, and letting its sounds tangle around us as we live. If only we could all describe our experiences--with music and with everything else--as perceptively as Corbett does."-- "Spectrum Culture"

"'Time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth'--Bowie croons, addressing a weary soul at the start of 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide.' The singer/prophet/alien holds out a hand to pick YOU up. Listen! Exalt! And like a fellow space commuter, Corbett clocks the tunes and throws out lines to the untethered. Dear reader, forget your age. The 'seventies' is an abstract pattern. Doesn't matter if you were an adult, a teenager, a tot, or not yet conceived in that decade, turn-on with Corbett in this one."-- "Gregg Bordowitz, artist and author of Tenement and Volition"

"This is a love cry. A cornucopia of zappy chapters, dedicated to the question as to what '70s music means. Deliciously nonpartisan, curious, open-eared, Corbett honors cross-pollinating musical fusions in a fleet, polymorphous prose that wears great knowledge lightly. There are bits of memoir here--but no dull autobiographical trudge. There are famous names--but deep obscurants, too. Above all: no yawnsome retreads of ye olde rock lore. It helps that Corbett's right about everything. Pick Up the Pieces is another gem in a maverick diadem."-- "Lars Iyer, philosopher and author of Wittgenstein Jr. and the trilogy Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus."