Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  Dancing to a music only I can hear.

  But still, I am dancing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I LIVED IN Hollywood for a large part of my adult life. The city of LA has a distinct personality, one that I came to understand through the alchemy of random experience and ill-considered jaunts. I thank this city and the exceptionalism that struggles (and often succeeds) to emerge from the fog of ordinariness.

  I have also played saxophone for many years, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, and when fate smiles, for both. The band in this book is based on the band Ensemble Borsalino, which I played with in 2011/12. Our powerhouse drummer, Michael Canfield, was stone cold sober. Rian Malan, our guitarist (and writer of substantial notoriety) does not, alas, have a trust fund to protect him. Peter Sklair, our excellent multi-genre bass player, was not a sexual predator, or a predator of any sort. Timon Wapenaar, our violinist and accordionist, now living in Spain, is a giant musical talent. He is accurately portrayed—I hope that he will not sue. Ensemble Borsalino catalyzed this book, and I am deeply grateful.

  To the legions of technology nerds I have known—you have always been my heroes.

  Thank you to my agent Tom Miller, Cal Barksdale, and the Skyhorse team, my sister Vicki, and the warm supportive embrace of Kate, Alex, and Joe Sidley.

  The academic paper to which I refer in Chapter 3 is from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence: DJH Brown and S Sidley, “The Expression of Aesthetic Principles as Syntactic Structures and Heuristic Preferences and Constraints in a Computer Program That Composes Jazz Improvisations,” in Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Papers from the 1993 Spring Symposium: Technical Report SS-93-01.