What have I been doing for the past month?

Not much.

I wrote a bunch of reviews. Three for Just Jazz Guitar (for which I haven't written in awhile):

Issi Rozen, a very interesting Israeli guitarist who graduated from Berklee and still lives in the Boston area. He mixes Middle Eastern sounds with jazz, though I wish he included more of the former.

Calvin Keys, who I never heard (or heard of) before and who really cooks on a double live CD.

And a guy from the north of England named Jamie Taylor. He's a professor of jazz guitar at the Leeds College of Music. His record, under the group name Java and called "Anywhere But Here," has about five different styles on it, everything from funk to Afro-pop to mainstream jazz. The best was the solo acoustic stuff that kind of sounds like folk-jazz; a couple of very nice arrangements on that.

I'm about to review a few more. I've been struggling for some time with Kurt Rosenwinkel. I just don't know what to make of him. If you read rec.music.makers.guitar.jazz, he's the heir to Metheny and Martino, etc. But there's something I'm not getting. I think I need to hear him live and as a sideman. What he's doing on this record seems a bit too ethereal and cold. The tunes are nice, and the harmony seems more complicated than post-bop jazz, but ...