Atelos is a reallly good imprint with a handful of books, most of which are available from Small Press Distribution or even Amazon.com. Website is at http://www.atelos.org/titles.htm. I particularly enjoy the books by Jalal Toufic and Fanny Howe.

From: Tom Bowden <TBowden@urrea.org> To: "'zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com'" <zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: Abercrombie's "Class Trip," Hips Road books, Billy Tipton Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 09:36:56 -0400

I. I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago, and it's rare for the disk to be off my CD-player ever since. I was familiar only with Abercrombie's name before I picked up this disk (on the strength of Joey Baron & Mark Feldman's appearance). Baron & Feldman's playing is impeccable. It's a pretty laid-back affair, but there are incandescent undertones to Baron's playing throughout as though, if called to do so, he could really blast out the rhythm--so that undertone lends a nice tension to the performance. Feldman--what can you say about Feldman other than appreciate and acknowledge his almost flawless sense of knowing what to play and when to give a song a sense of shape, drive, texture, and emotional balance. Good stuff.

II. During the recent conversations about Zorn's Hips Road, nobody mentioned Atelos, so I'll take the liberty of quoting at length from the back of Lohren Green's "Poetical Dictionary," which is published by Atelos:

"Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip's [sic!] Road and is devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing that challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate poetry from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact.

"All the works published as part of the Atelos project are commissioned specifically for it, and each is involved in some way with crossing tradtional genre boundaries, including for example, those that would separate theory from practice, poetry from prose, essay from drama, the visual image from the verbal, the literary form the non-literary, and so forth.

"The Atelos project when complete will consist of 50 volumes.

"The project directors and editors are Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz. The director for text production and design is Travis Ortiz; the director for cover production and design is Ree Katrak."

I won't list all the titles published so far--for that, write to Atelos, PO Box 5814, Berkeley, CA 94705-0814, or check out www.spdbooks.org, which distributes their titles. The book I have, "Poetical Dictionary," is #17 in the series (published in 2003), so it'll be awhile before they hit #50. For fans of avant-garde lit and collectors who seek everything Zorn-related, please note that the Atelos titles are limited to print runs of 500 (but minus the "limited edition" price tag--$12.95).

III. I have two Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet CDs, both highly recommended: "Box" and "Pollo d'Oro" (written and performed with the Estonian band Ne Zhdali), both of which, I believe, are out of print, although they *might* be available through Jessica Lurie's website. (It's been a couple of years since I last went there.) And, yes, Billy Tipton was a sax player out of Washington State who played in swing jazz bands. Apparently none of his ex-wives(!) or adopted sons knew Billy was a woman until her death, when a medical examiner (or funeral director) came to the mobile home s/he lived in to pick up the body, and broke the news to her boys. Tom

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