Sometimes history shows us that everything old is new again, and that the roots of what we consider new issues or developments actually go far back in time. This is certainly true in baseball in the case of an old ballplayer named Earl Averill. He’s interesting because at a crucial point in his career he took a gutsy stance on a salary issue which led to a proposed change in baseball’s policy regarding player sales. This change was never …
In the years since I wrote this piece about the underachievement of great pitching staffs, the starting pitching of the Philadelphia Phillies from 2010-11 became another case in point. They assembled a starting rotation that many saw as invincible and was described in some circles as maybe the best ever, consisting of four aces – Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels – plus some other decent starters in Vance Worley and Joe Blanton. They didn’t manage …
This is one of the very first baseball stories I ever wrote and it has jazz content too. I’ve been wanting to post it for a while and thanks to the miracles of modern digital technology, I was able to retrieve it from a dusty old email archive it had been sitting in for about four years. I’ll admit I’ve taken some liberties here in filling in the details as best I can; drinking was most definitely involved in …
The following is kind of a funny story about the production of TEST OF TIME, the CD by Mike Murley’s erstwhile trio (a.k.a. Murley-Bickert-Wallace) which just won the Juno Award in the “Best Traditional Jazz” category, whatever that means. (It used to sort of mean jazz involving straw hats, banjos and/or clarinets, street names from New Orleans and old drunk guys, but I think these days it mostly means jazz with songs you might actually know and maybe even …
I just had my first “Annual April Flicker Sighting” while at my smoking haunt on the grounds of Osgoode Hall. For about two weeks every April the past five or six years, a flicker shows up here and hangs out on the far side of the lawn near the gardener’s ramp eating ants out of the ground – poke, poke, poke with his beak – then scurries back into the cover of the shrubs lest he be seen. It’s …
So, what have we done to deserve this miserable dreck outside? I mean, could God just FOAD with the snow and ice already? Last night I watched the compressed replay of the Jays’ afternoon game in Detroit and you could see the player’s breath, the umpires and coaches were wearing mittens and toques for Chrissakes.
Are we trapped in some kind of Ingmar Bergman movie here? Like maybe “The Seventh Snow”, “Frozen Wild Strawberries” or “The Virgin Ice-Spring”? I …
It was pretty common practice in the 1930s and ’40s to simply borrow a famous (or even obscure) theme from a classical composition and turn it into a popular song, its composer being conveniently dead and thus incapable of suing or collecting royalties. The music business powers of the day weren’t too shy about this kind of thing (they’re even worse now) and it’s surprising how many of these hybrids have entered the jazz repertoire and are trotted out …