Other than people living in extremely remote areas untouched by media or technology – if they even exist anymore – I may have been one of the last to hear of the recent appalling attacks in Paris.

As my wife Anna would say, this is “not a good story for me”, although she learned of the tragedy even later than me, and only after I told her of it. But there was at least an understandable reason for our …

A shorter and slightly different (i.e. cleaner) version of this piece on Archie Alleyne appeared in the September issue of WholeNote magazine, v. 121 #1.

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June of this year brought a rash of deaths which rocked the jazz community – locally, bassist Lenny Boyd and drummer Archie Alleyne – and internationally, jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and third-stream-composer Gunther Schuller. I wrote memorial blogs about Coleman, Schuller and Boyd, who was my bass teacher. I held back in Archie …