Rabbit & Deacon, Jazz Healers

As listeners, we all know what the different musical instruments sound like….or at least we like to think so. Every once in a while though, a player will escape the tonal boundaries of his horn, making it sound like another one, or even like something we’ve never heard before. For example, Lester Young’s tenor saxophone, which seemed to come at the listener as a vapour through an invisible airshaft, sounding more like a French horn than a tenor. Fittingly, …

Bird Math

It seems that everything that was supposed to go right for the Blue Jays last year, but didn’t  – a deep, potent batting lineup, good defense, a strong starting rotation, a weakened A.L. East ripe for the taking – has come together this year, as though it just took a year for everything to settle. Jays’ management could have been forgiven for simply backing up the truck after last year’s Murphy’s Law-disaster and getting rid of almost everybody, but …