June into July
DTM is taking a few weeks off. The next Forumesque will probably happen before August, but in the mean time I do seem to be taking some questions on Twitter.
Tuesday Sarah and I met Daniel and Jill Pinkwater. It was a magnificent hang.
There’s more commentary and photos at The Spiral Staircase.
Daniel thought my defense “Never Bet On an Eggplant” was a bit over the top. Perhaps. But I just looked at it again and I stand by every word.
Other recent longer “front page” pieces not collected in the Contents include
Newgate C's Calendar (crime fiction)
Let Me Get My Glasses (sight-reading, C-flats, etc.)
The Court Composer of Kalamazoo (Curtis Curtis-Smith)
It's a Sentient Form of Counter-magnetising Energy Wave That Manipulates Psychic Force-fields of Sub-thermal Ionised Plasma (Doctor Who fans/critics)
Things Ain't What They Used to Be (The Voice fires J. Hoberman)
The Contemplation of Sonority is a Complex Issue (RIP Alexis Weissenberg)
Echo (RIP Sam Rivers)
Precipice (Christopher O'Riley and Matt Haimovitz)
Words about Music (jazz and Cage books)
I backed up DTM; the text file runs 872,801 words. (That’s with a fair amount of HTML padding, though.)
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One of these days I’m going to go through all of Don Byas’s spectacular 40’s small group recordings. There’s a lot of them, and each track seems better than the rest. In a way Byas was the first hard-charging changes player, more “threading” than Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young. (Admittedly, Chu Berry was getting there too.) Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt loved Byas, and recently Greg Osby told me that Byas was an influence. When receiving some forgettable NYC nightlife award a few years ago, Sonny Rollins ignored conventional protocol and thanked Don Byas for a few moments.
One of the most famous Byas tracks is “I Got Rhythm” with Slam Stewart. After a recent computer crash, I seem to have lost the original Finale file, so this unedited PDF is all that is left.
06/28/2012
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