Dave Wild (aka David Wild, aka David A. Wild), born in New York City shortly after its purchase by the Dutch, has wandered about a lot, with stops in Honolulu, California, Michigan, Los Angeles and San Juan PR among other places. (We're currently perched on the side of a rare hill in otherwise-flat Central Texas). Against all odds a Dave Wild Trio has managed to assemble and perform at each stop.

During the wanderings there were also some publications of interest (discographies, transcriptions, jazz journalism of various sorts). I acquired some academic credentials during a few of the stops (BA in English from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and an MA in English from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti MI). And of course, there's a day job, toiling in a sunless over-airconditioned office deep within the Federal bureaucracy, knee-deep in paperclips, pried-open staples and crumpled postits (the invisible means of support for all of this).  But it's likely the casual visitor to this virtual garage is more interested in what's inside those boxes marked JAZZ....

During our 15 years in Ann Arbor, that remarkable town west of Detroit, some equally remarkable things happened.  Casual research became not-so-casual, and eventually two standard discographies were born: The Recordings of John Coltrane: A Discography - 1979, and Ornette Coleman: A Discography - 1980, with Michael Cuscuna, both essentially out-of-print.   In the early seventies I began writing for Coda (out of Toronto) and a little later for downbeat (I was Detroit correspondent for that long-lived publication from 1979-1987).  The Coltrane research led to liner note assignments for something like 20 John Coltrane recordings on Impulse, in its various guises (ABC-Impulse, MCA Impulse, GRP Impulse and now Verve Impulse) .  The 1997assignment to do the notes for the definitive collection of Coltrane's 1961 Village Vanguard recordings (described on my Village Vanguard page, elsewhere in this site) was especially rewarding.  I can also claim two dozen or so articles in the Grove Dictionary of Jazz and an article on Coltrane's music (1961-1967) in Carl Woideck's anthology The John Coltrane Companion (published in 1998 by Schirmer), among other things.  Currently I'm part of a group working on a successor to Yasuhiro Fujioka's John Coltrane discography (his discography replaced mine as the "standard" in 1995), expanded to include a complete chronology, along with Fuji himself, Lewis Porter, Wolf Schmaler and Chris DeVito--all due out in the fall of 2006.