Melomania  

"When jaded music-nuts, chin-strokers and hipster whipper-snappers mull about things like 'where did punk rock come from,' very rarely do you hear anything about jazz. Some poor souls are under the misconception that "jazz" only means Chuck Mangione or George Benson, forgetting such pioneers as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, all of whom are the real grand-daddies of punk."--"The Real Godfathers of Punk" (1996) by Jason Gross

"It would be difficult to sum up Melomaniacs in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"--Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review