A Video Trip Down Memory Lane

Now that the new site, which isn’t really in its final form yet, is up, I thought I’d try something a little different. I do spend quite a bit of time – every once in a while – surfing around youtube.com or any of the other video portals and there’s tons of fun stuff I usually discover there.

For this post, I haven’t selected any rare items that most of you probably haven’t seen yet. Actually, many of the videos below are nothing out of the ordinary, really, but they serve a special purpose here. Continue Reading →

Sony botched the “Miles Davis: Complete Columbia Album Collection”

Although the various Amazon sites around the globe are ripe with absolutely crushing reviews of an otherwise great collectors boxed set,”Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection”, I have to add my two cents as well.

I have seen some badly-produced reissue boxed sets in my life, simply because I seem to be buying too many of them, but this one really is the icing on the cake. One could argue that for a reasonably low price, customers shouldn’t complain that much, but collectors being a larger part of the target audience for this one (despite the fact that collectors already have most of the Miles Davis they’ll ever need), Columbia/Legacy went out of its way to ruin this one. Continue Reading →

Observations 10/2009

It’s been a while, sadly enough, but if you have followed the erratic course of this website over the years, it probably didn’t come as a surprise at all. Real life just has a way of continually getting in the way all the time, especially if you have both a stressing day job and an extended family rife with illnesses and diseases. We’re all not getting younger and, boy, ain’t that the truth. What I used to pile onto my desk for a night’s worth of work today takes me a week and my energy line seems to have someone leeching off it continuously. At the moment, when I seem to have the time to sit down and write or update this or that, I’m just too tired, throw on some mindless BluRay disc … and pass out before the studio’s logo has had enough time to pop up on the screen.

I haven’t even had time to sample more than a tenth of the music I bought these past months and I haven’t given up hope that there will be that one weekend coming up on which I can sit down and do one of those monster 62-hour sessions interrupted by only the most basic sleep to be up and running again. I used to love those kinds of weekends, but they are few and far between. Actually, they have become extinct. Continue Reading →

Fusion and Stuff

Arranging a larger music collection can be a pretty daunting task, especially if it spans a larger number of genres and styles. Add to this the fact that you can file many CDs under different categories, that classical music adds a whole other dimension to the problems you are bound to encounter after a few years and what you get is … chaos. Mind you, not in my house, but I’ve seen collections that not only spanned I don’t know how many categories but were also placed in just about as many rooms and/or various assorted piles and heaps around that collector’s hallowed halls. Continue Reading →

“My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often—in fact, mostly—at the expense of everything else in my life.” (Stan Getz)

Observations 06-2009

“Life sucks … and then you die.” There was actually a graduating class at the school I work at that had my “motto” printed on the back of their graduation T-shirts once, well-knowing that I love to play the eternal cynic with a bunch of virtual winking smileys added for good measure. So, before I disappear into 14 days of “hell week(s)” of day-job last-minute panic, I thought I’d leave you with a brief post here to outline what’s been going on. Continue Reading →

Oscar Peterson Plays Porgy & Bess

Epitomizing.

You know it when you see it (to quote the infamous Justice Potter) and you get a lot of it around here. If I like something, I tell you so, and I don’t hold back on the verbiage to get my point across. So, should we give it another go?

Oscar Peterson, who in his lifetime had all too often been shunned by jazz critics and fans alike because of his supposed technical showmanship and supposed repetitive use of “set pieces” or clichés (take your pick), has an impressive oeuvre to his name. I have been known to strongly disagree with his detractors time and again and I’ve written the Internet thin, under various monikers, up in arms against this groundswell that has so far proven to be insurmountable in certain circles, and I don’t really care if I was successful. I just think it is important to raise my voice here and there to at least make my point of view known. Continue Reading →

“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy Gillespie)