This week brought the momentous news that Gunther Schuller died of leukemia at age 89. He was most certainly one of the giants of twentieth-century American music and just as surely one of the most versatile and wide-ranging of musicians. His work from the late 1940s on as a composer of contemporary classical music alone guarantees his eminence, he’s in all the history texts on the subject and won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 orchestral work “Of Reminiscences …
A baseball season is like a vast ocean of plays, numbers and events taking place in games that come at us daily, with the relentlessness of waves breaking on a shoreline. It’s impossible to keep track of everything or take it all in, but if you pay attention randomly, you’re bound to see things that haven’t happened in a long time or perhaps ever, left like nuggets washed up on a beach.
For example, on Thursday night I tuned …
Sometimes bad news comes in waves, as was the case recently when the Toronto jazz scene lost two of its stalwarts – bassist Lenny Boyd, who died on June 6, and drummer Archie Alleyne, who passed on June 8. Both had long careers and there will undoubtedly be forthcoming obituaries detailing their lives and many achievements. I have no intention of doing that here, even if I could, but I would like to share some memories, as each man …
I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but I wanted to revisit Ornette Coleman and yesterday’s article about him, for several reasons.
Firstly, the response from people was very quick, positive and voluminous, so thanks to everybody for their comments and support, this was both gratifying and a little surprising. I say surprising because I wrote the piece pretty quickly, wanting to get it out in one day in the interests of timeliness in this case, and for …
This morning brought the news that jazz legend Ornette Coleman died at age 85, from cardiac arrest. Somewhat surprisingly even to me, I’m having real trouble processing this information, my reaction is mostly one of profound shock and disbelief.
This flies in the face of logic and reason, which is often the case with our feelings. I mean, I know we all have to go eventually, even Ted Williams, and at 85, Ornette was well within the age range …
In 1971, Jimmy Rushing turned seventy and became terminally ill with leukemia. He’d been singing jazz professionally for almost fifty years, first leaving his native Oklahoma as an itinerant blues singer in the early twenties, eventually joining Jelly Roll Morton for a short spell in Los Angeles. He worked his way as far back east as Kansas City, getting in on the ground floor of the seminal, blues-based music teeming from that wide-open town. He sang with Walter Page’s …
In very timely fashion, a couple of readers informed me of a problem with the link to today’s post “Tricotism”, which didn’t seem to be taking people to the bulk of the piece after the initial teaser. I wasn’t sure at first what they meant, the problem being that I don’t receive the posts, so I don’t know what the whole process looks like. At any rate, I think I figured it out and fixed it. I somehow “mis-published” …
It was once said of ex-President Gerald Ford – perhaps unfairly – that he was “too dumb to chew gum and fart at the same time.”
And as Yogi Berra, that undisputed king of syntax-mangling one-liners once said, “Think!? How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”
Well….Odd as it may sound – or maybe not – I’m finding I can’t think and write at the same time, it’s a case of think …