Safe passage to Roberta Flack, an exceptional singer, wonderful pianist, and important role model for Black women’s self-empowerment. I’m embarrassed to admit that until I was in college, the entirety of my conscious exposure to her music was the 30 seconds of “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that was used in an Oil…
Continue ReadingI have found two go-to principles to preserve whatever integrity, agency, and semblance of sanity I might possess. Keep showing up and protect my heart. The specifics are malleable and the moment-to-moment strategies are situational but I keep coming back to these things and it keeps helping. Showing up is maybe self-explanatory? If there are…
Continue ReadingToday (Feb 4, 2025) marks the 80th anniversary of John Stubblefield’s birth. Stubbs is one of my favorite saxophonists and in a sense an exemplar of the “lost generation” of folks like Victor Lewis and James Williams who, while beloved within the jazz community, fell in the cracks in the 1980s landscape of straight-ahead jazz’s…
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