Bassist, producer, and composer Victor Wooten is without question a master musician. He’s played with everyone from Larry Coryell and Bela Fleck to Gov’t Mule and Mike Stern; from India Arie to Branford Marsalis; from Daniel Amos to Natalie MacMaster. He’s released seven albums under his own name. His eighth, Palmystery, drops April 1 from Heads Up.

Wooten has also written a number of popular — some would argue necessary — instructional manuals for bassists. The Music Lesson is self-published by his Vixboox imprint and it marks his first foray into the role of novelist. According to some (see below), his story is about enlightenment, told through the eyes of a bass player (big surprise there) who encounters a rather amorphous and ambiguous character that becomes his musical and spiritual teacher. It is cosmic, but it hardly qualifies as a “new age” tome. It’s far too funny and even random for that. And while it is about music, it’s also about the process of living. Narrated in the first person, Wooten’s novel feels like a story told intimately over dinner, and the protagonist’s voice comes across as both stunned, kinetically charged, and in a state of near constant surprise as he unfolds his tale. The novel has flaws: Its character development is sketchy, and it feels more like an autobiography than a fleshed-out novel, and the “plot” is almost nonexistent. But it’s no big deal. It’s a first book offered with an immediacy that puts his voice in the ear of the reader and it’s a good yarn.

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Ian Carr fans rejoice! Some 35 years after its initial publication, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and author Ian Carr’s long-out-of-print tome Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain has been re-published by Northway Publications in the U.K. Though Carr has also authored fine biographies of Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis, Music Outside remains his greatest achievement as a writer. This is perhaps due to his first-hand knowledge and experience of the scene that emerged from the 1960s and into the ’70s. Carr was a member of the EmCee Five — his brother Mike’s band — in the early 1960s, and co-leader of the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet. This amazing group released seven albums between 1964 and ‘69, all of which are available on the BGO imprint. Carr may be best known as co-founder of the influential jazz-rock ensemble Nucleus with future Soft Machine saxist Karl Jenkins. That band included future Softs drummer John Marshall, saxophonist Brian Smith, bassist Chris Hynnes, and guitarist Chris Spedding. Its first three recordings, particularly Elastic Rock, We’ll Talk about It Later, and Solar Plexus, are seminal. Even the dates with later lineups (with Tony Coe and Norma Winstone) are all worth hearing; luckily, Nucleus’ albums are available on BGO.

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Myths hover around the Replacements, but they always have. Back when the group stumbled across America in the ’80s their reputation preceded them, as fans found it equally enticing that the band could either be amazing or awful, depending on the night. Some lucky fans saw the ‘Mats at both extremes, some — like Joe Henry — never were lucky enough to see one good night. No matter what kind of concert you saw, the shows you didn’t see loomed as large as the ones you did, so it’s no surprise that there are generation of Replacements diehards that worship the band without ever seeing them live: even at their peak, they were loved for what their fans didn’t experience. The Replacements are romanticized once again in Jim Walsh’s new oral history All Over But the Shouting, the first book ever published on the ‘Mats.

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English neurologist Oliver Sacks has been a great popularizer of literature on the vagaries of the brain, with bestsellers like Awakenings (made into a film starring Robin Williams) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (made into an opera by Michael Nyman). A large number of the cases of neurological disorders he documents have to do with patients whose musical abilities were unlocked, or amplified, or remained unimpaired, when an injury or disorder otherwise ravaged their cognitive abilities. (The man who couldn’t distinguish between his wife and a hat, for instance, was an expert singer whose musical gifts stayed intact.) Sacks devotes his newest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, to research about the topic and to some of his most fascinating musical case studies. One finding he reports is that while most artistic work leaves the brain physically unaltered, musicians have brains that are noticeably different from the average: the corpus callosum, which connects the two halves of the brain, is larger, providing a more substantial connection, and the visual, spatial, auditory and motor areas of the cerebellum are also enlarged. This information might bring some comfort to performers or composers scrambling to make it in the cutthroat music business (at least they’ve got expanded brains!), as well as to music teachers who wonder if the effort to get their students to practice is really worth the struggle. It should also cause legislators and administrators to think twice before snipping music classes out of our school systems. And it would be terrific if the idea provided the incentive for the person who always wanted to sing or play an instrument to make the leap and just do it. The pleasure they experience in making their own music should be plenty of reward, even if they can’t feel their corpus callosum bulking up.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker, was published October 16. It’s been eagerly anticipated by a lot of new music fans, because Ross is an insightful, thoughtful critic with broad enthusiasms, and he’s a fine stylist. During a recent trip to a local bookstore to pick up a copy, a clerk lit up like a sparkler when asked about the book: “It’s selling so fast we can hardly keep it in stock!” Another clerk overheard the conversation and rushed over: “This is the most amazing book! I started reading it two nights ago, and it’s like a thriller — I can’t put it down. It made me want to run out and listen to Webern!”

Reading just the first chapter made me understand the clerks’ excitement. It describes the Austrian premiere of Richard Strauss‘ Salome in Graz, six months after its world premiere in Dresden. Word about the opera had spread, and just about everyone in the Austrian musical world and beyond was there, including Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Gustav and Alma Mahler, the widow of “the Waltz King,” Johann Strauss II, Alexander Zemlinsky, Giacomo Puccini, and Adolf Hitler! Ross does a terrific job of establishing the opera in a musical, literary, political and sociological context, … but hang on — I’ve got to run out and listen to Salome.

No one would blame anyone, bookstore customer and editorial staffer alike, for wondering aloud “It died?!” at the sight of Norman Lebrecht’s book, The Life and Death of Classical Music, published this summer by Anchor. By all accounts, Classical Music is alive and well as always, more alive in some ways – on the concert circuit and among independent labels – in recent days than in awhile, though ailing right along with all of the other arts in these economically challenged times. However, Lebrecht’s take is that major recording concerns – the former Polygram, BMG/RCA, CBS/Sony, and EMI – did the job of husbanding classical music, and its star performers, better than anyone else in history. With their complete re-organization after the turn of the new century into new entities that are handling far less classical music than once was the case, Lebrecht’s view is that this is sufficient cause to declare it dead. This is despite the many concerts, young artists and composers, publishers and independent labels that are out there pursuing it as though it’s still alive. He blames this grim state of affairs on corporate greed, overspending, and kowtowing to powerful classical artists; his highly anecdotal “histories” are also laced with scandals and lots of spicy sex.

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The past few years have seen a number of films and documentaries that speculate on the life, death, and mental state of the now-legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and it looks like one more is in the pipeline.

MSNBC reports that David Benioff will be drafting a script for the biopic Heavier Than Heaven, based on a book of the same name. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, will serve as an executive producer of the project, along with her lawyer Howard Weitzman.

There appears to be little known about the project thus far — both a Google search and the Internet Movie Database came up empty — but those who wish to get a jump on the film can buy the source material online or at their favorite brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Related: Official Courtney Love website