Isaiah Fontenot

Isaiah Fontenot came to writing about music sideways, through a cataloguing degree and eight years of processing other people's papers. The habit that came out of it is the one that organises his books: before asking what a thing means, ask who said it, when, and what they stood to gain.

He writes about American music as a problem in evidence. His work is preoccupied with the gap between what a life can be shown to have contained and what has merely been repeated about it often enough to sound established, and with the musicians whose worst conduct is attested only by themselves. No Second Voice, on Miles Davis, is a cross-examination of the one document every account of that life has been built on.

He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he keeps a shelf of session logs and no opinions he cannot source.