I’ve written often about John Corbett, and his multifaceted resumé makes it easy—he’s a professor, art gallerist, record producer, music journalist, and musician, as well as (full disclosure) a longtime friend of mine. In fact, ten days ago I covered a new reissue from Corbett vs. Dempsey, the label he runs with his gallery partner, Jim Dempsey.
The original essays are witty and erudite, and cumulatively they serve as a giddy rejection of canon—Corbett makes a powerful argument that any list of the best or most important recorded music is necessarily a failure. When guitarist Joe Morris replied to a Vinyl Freak column to protest the praise it heaped on obscure Swedish guitarist Staffan Harde, who’d made only one record, Corbett responded, “Who cares whether anyone outside of Sweden has heard Harde? We should be hungry to hear things we haven’t heard, open to the idea that something (even something historical) might surprise us. That’s the subtext of this column. Icons sometimes deserve their iconic status, but on the other hand sometimes great music thinkers don’t get their due. Or people create one incredible record, then fall off into making trivial fluff. Should we think less of that one record?”
He and Kapsalis eventually gave the Sun Ra material to the Chicago Jazz Archives of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago. Corbett still has an obscene record collection, but he’s realized that his greatest mission is to share and educate—to arrange things so that others can experience the joy that he does. As much as anything I’ve read by him, Vinyl Freak does precisely that.
