Book Review: Music Notes: Tales from an American Singer

Music Notes: Tales from an American Singer. J.J. Maze, Nonipeek Press, 1 August 2022, Paperback, 138 pages.

Reviewed by Jose Nateras.

Following her award-winning memoir, Walk Until Sunrise, Jade J.—J.J.—Maze has put together a collection of short stories, Music Notes: Tales from an American Singer. With illustrations by Indonesian illustrator and graphic designer Ryan Prakoso, Maze’s collection features seven short stories, each one an exploration of some facet of a musician’s life. 

The collection, like Maze’s prose, is lean. While many writers exploring the intersections of art and life may find themselves getting lost in flowery metaphors, Maze focuses on a more straightforward approach. In her introduction, Maze admits to being obsessed with the biographies of musicians such as Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, and more. This can be felt in her writing with stories that focus more on the interpersonal relationships and the human connections occurring in her musician characters’ lives alongside the gigs. Her female central protagonists connect with various men that find themselves in their respective orbits: a sexy new drummer (“Two for Nothing”), a goat-raising yogi (“The Blood in my Veins”), the father of a vocal student (“The Voice Lesson”), and so on. Not all of these interactions are romantic per se, but they are intimate, and these intimate connections are very much akin to the sort of connection experienced between a musician and their audience, to that which is shared by musical collaborators playing together. 

Considering her first book was a memoir, it’s not entirely surprising to find that, in reading Music Notes, there’s a sense that Maze feels most comfortable writing from the first-person point of view. However, in the stories where she embraces the third person (“Do You, Can You, Will You”) and moves away from narratives that seem particularly grounded in her own experience for more fantastical fare (the supernatural, surreal “Don’t Just Stand There”), Maze shows what she’s truly capable of as a writer.

Prakoso’s continuous line illustrations prove a perfect match for Maze’s writing. With the clean and seemingly simple lines, Prakoso weaves detailed and curving images that serve well to the way that Maze takes inspiration from her lived experiences, weaving and curving them into new narratives. When that lived experience is as rich as that of a musician living in Chicago, who has gone from life as a teen runaway to a Northwestern grad, and more, it’s no wonder that the stories which result are as varied and as they are in Music Notes. Just as a jazz musician is able to riff and improvise, taking familiar melodies and themes and making them into something new, Maze weaves various influences (from fairytales and urban fantasy to simple, slice-of-life vignettes) into a collection that, though varied, maintains a consistent voice throughout.  

Although the collection is not particularly long, the cover does read “Book No.1” (in a stylate that almost looks like an homage to a comic book cover), so there may well be a second collection of “tales” from Maze in the future. However, with two of the stories that comprise this collection being, what Maze calls “novelettes,” one can’t help but wonder if perhaps she will explore longer works in the future.