Slim: List of past picks of the week: Now, this is depressing, for me anyway. Slim works for the Cadence Magazine/North Country Audio empire up in the Adirondacks somewhere. They have a couple of their own labels (Cadence Jazz, CIMP), and distribute hundreds more obscure jazz labels -- more than anyone else in the US by a huge margin. There are things about the company that are endearing and things that are maddening, but I don't want to get into that now. I first bumped into Slim dealing with order issues, long time ago. A few years back she started writing a column in Cadence magazine: rather informal, offhanded even, noting some recent faves. Hadn't noticed her "pick of the week" selections in the email -- had gotten into the habbit of deleting it instantly. But I always appreciate a good tip, so this time I checked out the master list. Now comes the depressing part: I hear a lot of new jazz, including a lot of real obscure avant-garde stuff, but I've only heard one of sixty-some Slim picks: Katie Bull's Love Spook. I suppose I could slough the whole thing off by noting that I gave Love Spook a sad B- grade. Still, I can't help but think how much I'm missing and how hard it would be to ever catch up. (Who, for instance, are Perhenrik Wallin, Peter Gullin, Piotr Wojtasik?) As it is, I've only rarely gotten service from Cadence/CIMP, a label that requires more constant prodding than I've felt up to. Other labels (like Dragon and Power Bros, the source of the three artists I just listed) have proven impossible to track down, or at least unresponsive. And even if I did somehow get everything I'd like to hear I'll never find time to do it justice -- that in itself is one thing that inhibits me from asking. So, this is depressing: both as a measure of the known unknown, and for its sense of how unknowable the unknown is.