Making Strides, Part 2 – James P.

“There has long been a disturbing tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as “progress”, a practice that sends the musicians who have been supplanted into the outer darkness” – Whitney Balliett.

I wanted to revisit the above quotation which began Part 1 of this piece, because the process of marginalization Balliett describes applies to few more than James P. Johnson. Johnson was a key pioneer of jazz piano, the founder and widely acknowledged king …

Around the Old Ball Yards….

Some random thoughts on the current baseball season……….

There are many ways to spell tough luck in baseball, it’s that kind of game…one of the best ways this year is S-a-m-a-r-d-z-i-j-a, as in pitcher Jeff Samardzija. Coming into this week, he had a brilliant ERA of about 1.64, but absolutely zilch to show for it – a record of 0-4. Of course he pitches for a bad team, in fact the ‘poster-boy’ of all bad teams, the Cubs. This …

.500, Ho!

The weather around these parts hasn’t consistently warmed up yet (a sort of “Prague Spring”), but already the baseball season has reached the quarter-mark, with most teams having played about 40 games.

The baseball has been similarly lukewarm, so far it’s mostly been characterized by the high number of teams treading water at a winning percentage of .500 or so. Of the 30 MLB teams, 23 are within five games of either side of the break-even mark. If you …

Phew….

It’s been a while since my last posting and I’d like to explain…..It’s not that I’ve become lazy of late, or developed a sudden case of writer’s block or anything like that, although……For the past few days, I’ve been unable to log on to the site itself, which is where I do the actual writing. Whenever I tried to get in, I was greeted with the same scary message that the website was temporarily unavailable, due to a “brute …

Making Strides, Part 1 – Labels

There has long been a disturbing tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as “progress”, a practice that sends the musicians who have been supplanted into the outer darkness” –  Whitney Balliett.

The process so neatly described above by Mr. Balliett has bothered me for some time, though I’ve also been guilty of it myself at times, certainly when I was younger. What troubles me the most is the last part about older musicians …

Goin’ to Chicago (Sorry, But I Can’t Take You)

Like many of us, I’m growing a little tired of hearing or thinking about Toronto’s disgraced mayor. But his recent crash off the wagon and skedaddle to a rehab shack somewhere in or near Illinois got me to thinking of something more pleasant, namely the classic Count Basie-Jimmy Rushing blues, “Goin’ to Chicago”.

Basie recorded this a number of times in the ’40s with Jimmy Rushing singing. I love Rushing to death, but my favourite version of this is …