October 11, 2002 – 9:01 pm
A Night Out With Wynton Marsalis
I fail to see the point of this New York Times article, except to reassure you once again that Wynton Marsalis is a genius, and he’s hipper than you’ll ever be. Man, this guy annoys me – but hell, he can play the trumpet…
The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who on Monday night was due at a party downtown, at a dinner Midtown and at a jam session in Harlem, keeps a frenetic schedule befitting a political candidate. But, said Mr. Marsalis, who has three sons by two former girlfriends, he would never be able to run for office. [More...]
Satin Dolls
A nice first-person piece about having grown up during the last days of the West Coast jazz scene. Appropriately self-involved. The West Coast jazz players dilemma? Golf or Surfing.
Last July, I attended a tribute to the Gerry Mulligan Quartet at the Lighthouse nightclub in Hermosa Beach. Since my stepdad, Bob, had been Gerry Mulligan’s original bassist, the Los Angeles Jazz Institute invited him and his family to hear a couple of concerts featuring works by Mulligan and some Stan Kenton. [More...]
Aliant Telecom Delivers Digital Music to the Computer
With the advent of copy protected CDs, and music that you could play in some places (say, your stereo) and not others (your laptop), the idea of ‘ownership’ of music seems to be becoming redundant. Why own something when you can have it piped to you at the discretion of a telecommunications giant?
Yeah, they’ll pay royalties out of what you give them, but what if you want to be selective – or listen to something that wasn’t released on one of the big 5? Don’t be fooled – this is not ‘just like radio’. It’s the result of a panicked bunch of major labels teaming up with a revenue-hungry telco.
That’s always good for music…
Aliant Telecom, in partnership with Galaxie – CBC’s Continuous Music Network, has launched one of the country’s first digital music services licensed in Canada to offer streaming subscription- based music to its High Speed Internet subscribers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. [More...]
“Mummified” Dinosaur Discovered In Montana
Finally, paleontologists get more than just a few bones to pick over. Now they can see if their theories – and Speilberg’s movies – measure up to reality…
Leonardo, a mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur was only about three or four years old when he died, but he’s proving to be a bonanza for paleontologists today. His fossilized skeleton is covered in soft tissue—skin, scales, muscle, foot pads—and even his last meal is in his stomach. [More...]
‘The Pursuit of Oblivion’: Drug Taking as Part of Human Nature
It’s also human nature to sit on the couch, watch TV and eat junk food… go to deafening rock concerts… start wars… We’re a self-destructive bunch – but it doesn’t necessarily make all these things a particularly good idea.
‘Absolute sobriety is not a natural or primary human state. Humans have always used drugs, a fact that underpins ”The Pursuit of Oblivion,” a history of the controlled and uncontrolled use of substances that alter consciousness, shift feeling and meet an immense range of human wants and needs. [More...]
The prejudice against laughter
Political correctness is what we use to disguise bigotry. If you don’t actually think of people who use wheelchairs as ‘cripples’, then you won’t need to search around for the polite word. The only thing worse than being politically correct is being deliberately politically incorrect – airing your prejudices and calling it ‘speaking your mind’. The world will be a better place when political correctness is redundant – when we just don’t need it anymore…
This also raises the question – does humour require a victim?
Though I resist political correctness as strongly as I can, I have imbibed enough of it to feel distinctly uneasy whenever a joke about a national or ethnic group is told. It is not that I fail to find such jokes funny: on the contrary, I often find them very funny, but that is precisely the source of my unease. [More...]
Listening to: ‘Saint-Germain-des-Pres Cafe II: The finest electro-jazz compilation’ – Various Artists (Wagram)