Some highlights and stories from this year’s very enjoyable Prince Edward County Jazz Festival.
I’ve had my nose to the grindstone pretty good for a while now and this has had me feeling every inch of my age and then some. My birthday came and went on August 16 in Picton and joining the 56-year-old club would normally have lead to some angst and hand-wringing over what a drag it is getting old, as The Rolling Stones once …
Have you noticed how nicknames have pretty much disappeared from jazz and baseball? What happened, where did they all go? There’s still the odd half-decent one around, like say Joey Bats, or Trombone Shorty. But these days it seems the only celebrities in any number with colourful nicknames are rap or hip-hop “artists”, and I’d happily say goodbye to their soubriquets if it also meant the musical genre would just disappear, forever and without a trace. Forgive my white-ass, …
I’ve done a lot of general reading about my two main interests, jazz and baseball. Histories, biographies, collections of reviews, stories and reportage, you name it. It’s odd, but every once in a while in a lifetime of random reading, two unrelated subjects can intersect and lead to the very same little dot in time, like two different GPS locators of history.
Over the course of thirty-five years of this indiscriminate rambling around in the past, I chanced to …
I’ve been playing a steady gig at a hotel bar for a while now with a trio that consists of pianist Bernie Senensky, drummer/leader Dan Bodanis and me on bass. Bernie took most of March off to do a tour of the U.S. with another group and as this approached he was scrambling around trying to line up subs and confessed to me he wasn’t really looking forward to the road, that he’d miss our gig and was worried …
There were some Ray Bryant stories I wanted to get to in the earlier piece about him, but it was too long, as usual. I’m considering a reverse Tom Waits: having had a bottle in front of me for many years, I may opt for a frontal lobotomy in the hope it might shorten my writing. It’s not as if it I’m a mental giant or anything, there would be no great loss involved. Anyway, here goes.
Though he …
The pianist Ray Bryant died in June of 2011 and has recently been on my mind a lot, mostly because I chanced to hear some of his records again lately. Though he made a lot of good ones, most of them don’t quite do him justice. You really had to hear him live to get the full impact and joy of his playing. Luckily for me, I both heard and played with Ray live quite a bit – a …
I heard a cardinal in high-fidelity just as I left my house the other morning – “bwordy, bwordy, bwordy” echoing down the street. The trees being still bare, it was easy to spot him by following the song – he was up in the top of a maple about forty yards away. As he shifted briefly from one branch to another, the light caught him at just the right angle, bringing a brilliant rush of crimson even at that …