More Diz, actually playing this time, with Thelonious himself, and the rest of the "Giants of Jazz," including Sonny Stitt, sax, Kai Winding, trombone, Al McKibbon, bass, and Art Blakey, drums. The Giants were not happy campers, because only a few years before, they’d all been headliners, and now they were a nostalgia act. Remarkably,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Jay Nordlinger, conservative with a conscience
It seems like every day—because it is every day—that Donald Trump will say something so gross and offensive that one wants to say—and should say—“if a Democratic president had said that, the conservative media would have exploded in outrage and disbelief, following which they would have immediately demanded impeachment.” Of course, no one wants to…
Sarah Vaughn, Milt Jackson—“Round Midnight”
Not too shabby! Also Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet (but largely MC), James Moody, sax, Al Haig, piano, Ray Brown, bass, and Kenny Clarke, drums. Also not shabby! From 1976. Posted by SOGLIDER
Questions that should not be asked, much less answered: What was the deal with “guest stars” on Murder, She Wrote?
Murder, She Wrote, the (very) long-running 80s-90s TV series featuring Angela Lansbury as the intrepid J. B. Fletcher, is today widely known as the “insomniac’s delight”, not because it’s always available on reruns—though it is—but because it puts you to sleep. Who needs Nytol when you’ve got J. B. Fletcher on the case? Yet, even…
That is no country for old men. And neither is this one.
Democrats continue to pay the price for the “Democratic Drought”, the absence of new faces for the party during the Obama years, either because existing new faces went down to defeat in the disastrous elections of 2010 and 2014 and never re-emerged or simply never appeared at all, leaving us with fuddie-duddies like Hillary, Bernie,…
Who’s dumber, Elizabeth Warren or Max Boot?
To my mind, Elizabeth Warren is basically a Hillary Clinton who doesn’t summer in the Hamptons. That is, a well-meaning know it all who wants to run your life for you. So when disillusioned conservative Max Boot took aim at her in the Washington Post—“Elizabeth Warren has lots of ideas. Bad ideas.”—I was (largely) content…
The Ecstasy of St. Dave
David Brooks has, in no particular order, left his wife of 27 years, married a woman 23 years his junior—his “research” assistant; who could see that coming?—and found Christ. He’s written a book on the latter, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, which apparently involves, well, dumping your old wife and finding…
Who could have seen this coming? Except everybody, I mean
Politico has the word: “Big businesses paying even less than expected under GOP tax law”. That’s right, according to Brian Faler, “Federal tax payments by big businesses are falling much faster than anticipated in the wake of Republicans’ tax cuts, providing ammunition to Democrats who are calling for corporate tax increases.” It gets worse, says…
The irresistible charm of the outlier updated: New York Times Edition
It seems like only yesterday—because it was— that I was riffing on the tendency of the lamestream media (and everyone else) to generalize on the follies of our times not on the average but the extreme, to wit, an article in the Washington Post decrying the alleged abysmal performance of the Arlington County, Va. English…
Herodotus Redux. Or, the irresistible charm of the outlier
“After three years at one middle school, a student still didn’t know how to use a bilingual dictionary” So read a recent headline on the “front page” of the Washington Post web edition, leading the reader to a story by Theresa Vargas with the headline, “Arlington Schools has agreed to improve how it supports English…