Top 10 Favorite Steve Wilson tracks
10 (+1) favorite tracks by the great saxophonist Steve Wilson. Enjoy!
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Top 10 Favorite Bobby Hutcherson Tracks
Aside from being in shock that Bobby Hutcherson is gone, I struggle to figure out a way to summarize his musical contributions. For me his music will always be defined by the way his infectious warmth and rugged creative searching shattered any listener’s capacity to put the resulting music into a rigid box. Here is a small sampling of my favorites from his discography.
Continue ReadingPhoebe Snow, St. Peter, and the meaning(s) of “Legacy”
I’m a fan of Phoebe Snow from two different angles, angles that one might even deem at odds with one another. As I contemplate what in music resonates the most with me (something I do approximately 5 times a day) and ponder what life is about (something I do approximately 10 times a day), Phoebe keeps coming to my mind.
Continue ReadingAlternate Realities: EDS Awareness Month 2016
This year’s EDS Awareness Month post: examining what it means to speculate on “what might have been” without our adversity.
Continue Reading“Nice” Is Overrated: Farewell, Randi
On Monday I attended the memorial services that marked, in a sense, the last goodbye to my friend and colleague Randi Brandt. One conclusion is that Randi was not a nice person – and I mean that in the best way possible, for reasons I’ll explain here.
Continue ReadingTop 10 Favorite Prince Tracks
Like so many, I can’t believe that Prince is gone, and I’m struggling not only to reconcile that, but also to reflect with any coherence on his impact on my own musical conception. When I was a kid, I listened eagerly to all his singles and watched his videos, with no conception of anything else…
Continue ReadingTop 10 (x2) Favorite James Williams Tracks
My biggest “eureka” moment as a budding jazz musician (or, to be accurate, the moment when I decided I needed to BE a budding jazz musician and not just a dabbler) came the first time I heard “Magical Trio 2” by James Williams, like the moment in the “Wizard of Oz” where it goes from black & white to color – in a flash I heard everything I wanted music to be, all in one place. If life were just, the Soulful Mister Williams would’ve been 65 today.
Continue ReadingTop 10 Favorite Ted Dunbar Tracks
Every few years I dust off Ted Dunbar’s “A Nice Clean Machine for Pedro” and challenge my students at Wesleyan to learn it – such a gorgeous and deceptively challenging tune. Last year I wrote about Ted’s impact as an educator, but now it’s time to talk about his unique and powerful voice as a guitarist and composer.
Continue ReadingTop 10 (x2) Favorite Jazz Albums of 2015
It seems that with each year it gets harder to keep up with all the great music being released. I began with a Top 10 list, and in the end struggled to narrow it down to even 20.
Continue ReadingWhose Burden Should This Be?
If you saw somebody carrying a heavy load, would you take your knapsack and put it on his or her back? Of course not. Should a healthy person walking up hill ask for a ride from someone in a hand-cranked wheelchair? Of course not. In situations that concrete, it’s pretty easy to assess who can handle more burden and who could stand to be relieved of some. So why do we so often do this with our words and our actions? Why do we take people already burdened by trauma or oppression and unload our own comparatively manageable burdens upon them? The “Love Wins” mantra to which I and so many others have clung for the last three years is predicated on compassion, and we mustn’t lose sight of that amidst philosophical arguments that ring hollow without it.
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