The recent passing of David Sanborn (it happened back in May) recently got me thinking about the TV show he cohosted with Jools Holland back when I was a teenager. It was called Night Music. Well, apparently, the show was originally titled Sunday Night, and I’m not sure when the name changed, or whether I caught any episodes of it back when it was called that. I do vividly remember tuning in to watch Night Music, though.
Category: REVIEWS
Remembering Susannah McCorkle
Today 23 years ago, Susannah McCorkle passed. It was a suicide, after years of struggling with depression, like so many (most?) suicides are. You can read about her life a lot of places, but I liked this profile best. I only saw McCorkle perform once: that was almost a decade before she passed, back when the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival was a bigger event, and more big-name acts from around the world stopped by while crossing Canada. McCorkle was charismatic and luminous, her performance fascinating. Her “vocalise” performances of several famous jazz solos set to lyrics of her own devising mesmerized …
April Reading (2024)
This is the fourth in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024.
March Reads (2024)
This is the third in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024, covering the month of March. As always, the beginning of semester is a busy time and I get less reading done, but even more, I started some books that I’m still working on finishing in April… but I prefer to only mention books when I finish them, so they won’t get blogged about till the end of this month (at the soonest).
They Wanted to Believe
So, since the end of last year, I’ve been watching The X-Files. Or, rather, I was at first re-watching it, since I saw the first five or so seasons as they aired, and then I continued on into the seasons I’d missed. I thought I’d sum up my thoughts about it here.
February Reads
This is the second in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024. Some of them are book club books, most of them not. Being in a book club has been helpful for me in widening my reading a little, but getting into the habit is something I’d attribute more to just pushing gently until the habit came back somewhat. The other issue is time, and I’m taking steps with work to moderate (i.e. eliminate) time spent grading work as much as possible, so hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up once the semester starts in March.
Troika! Numinous Edition
Last year, I checked out Troika: Numinous Edition and ran a couple of one-shots (well, three-shots) for groups from both of the gaming Discords I socialize on. I wrote up an entire post about it, only to… entirely forget to publish it. So anyway, here it is, many months late.
Sam Gendel Transcription Done
Well, I spent the last week (yes, it took me a week) transcribing Sam Gendel’s solo on Lonnie’s Lament in this live performance with “Tiki” Pasillas and Fabiano do Nascimento: You can find a link for the PDF on my brand new Transcriptions page. I figured I might as well have a page that indexes these, assuming I’m going to do more. (And I do plan on doing at least some more of them.) I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to trying to transcribe improvisations. Other than one hurried study of a Charlie Rouse …
Music @Jazzin Lab, Sejong City: Tony Lakatos and Thomas Stronen & Time is a Blind Guide
A couple of months ago, my wife excitedly informed me that she’d discovered the existence of a jazz club in Sejong City, only about a ten minute drive from our home. The place is called Jazzin Lab and they hold regular concerts, of which I’ve now had the chance to attend a couple. Both groups performing were new to me, but both were really outstanding, so I thought I’d do a little writeup while they’re fresh in my mind.
December-January Reads
A new year, a new reading list. This one’s for books I read in 2024. As always, the posts come at some delay after reading. I’m also going to go with shorter posts responding to multiple books from now on, which might give me a little more time to, uh, read. Oh, one more thing: I’ve recently (as of last November) joined a book club. Normally I’m ambivalent about book clubs and wouldn’t join one, but a friend invited me and the book list is interesting enough to make me give it a shot. Some of my readings will be …