A friend sent me a link to a possible world very close to our own: Under It All, Kurt Rosenwinkel's lost Impulse! debut from the late 1990s. In some extra-artistic corporate happening, Rosenwinkel was shuffled to Verve, and the album was shelved; one of his new bosses said no. No way. We cannot sell this as the major label debut of "the best new jazz guitar player since Metheny and Scofield"; no one's even going to know which sound is the guitar. This is not jazz; this is the private fantasy of a crazy man. It's not that he's not communicating with his audience, he's communicating way too much, which is the definition of "uncool." It is frightening to hear musical intelligence this radically unbounded by conventions of genre. Instead, Verve released Enemies of Energy, a self-financed recording Rosenwinkel had made in 1996, which, though still sort of weird, manages to toe the line as mainstream jazz. It's still oddly lacking in guitar content adequate to the legend of Rosenwinkel—Verve had Metheny and Scofield write blurbs for the liner notes, as if to compensate for the absence of wizardry. Enemies privileges the song, even when the song is sort of bland; Kurt doesn't really shred until his second Verve release, The Next Step, and then it's mind-crushing laser beams, enemies made of energy, the anti-humanism at the end of modernism's rainbow—the awesome, hero-destroying jazz guitar we were hoping for the first time round. But not until Heartcore (Verve 3) is Rosenwinkel allowed to approach the friendly-alien weirdness and compulsive musical artmaking of Under It All.

If these files are in the right order, "Brooklyn Sometimes" is the opener. How I wish these sounds (friends of energy) were the mainstream jazz world's introduction to Kurt Rosenwinkel! This music says: sometimes Brooklyn is like this. Sometimes you walk down a tree-enfolded lane of rowhouses in Brooklyn Heights to this beat. Sometimes a Casio keyboard comes to life and flies you over Prospect Park on a cloud of code. Sometimes you fall asleep on a bench and dream you are under that avenue of palm trees from the cover of Native Dancer, singing like Nascimento in the space café, writing in cursive in that smoggy tropical sky. Sometimes a cartoon insect whose proboscis is a horn walks up the steps from an underground apartment and plays music at you; because his body is an instrument, singing and playing are the same for him. I practiced a lot and figured out how to speak in colors. Now let's hover outside this window and see if anyone notices us.