Benny Green, pianist with the Ray Brown trio, takes the lead in this version of Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail.” The trio includes Brown on bass, taking the backseat on this one, and drummer Jeff Hamilton, enhanced by a very large European big band. Recorded in concert in Cologne in 1994. Green quotes too much to be…
Surge n’ Pause, n’ Pause n’ Pause
OK, enuff with the Mary Worth stuff. I’m also an expert on foreign policy. Seriously! In today’s Washington Post, we learn that “Pentagon leaders” want to delay any reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq for at least another Friedman unit—that fabled six months after which “we’ll know a lot more” and our “real but fragile”…
Don’t laugh. That plummeting mote was once Cynthia Oznick.
Cynthia Oznick, on the occasion of her fœtid bemedalling with the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award: “Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer—lauded, fêted, bemedalled—plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Who nowadays speaks of Bernard Malamud, once a diadem in…
More Mary Mega Madness!
Well, just a little, to get you going. Josh, the Comics Curmudgeon, offers a link to Mary Worth, Style Maven,” maintained by “Tina,” who introduces herself thusly: “I’m a seamstress and grad student and I don’t sleep nearly enough.” Well, I’ll say. Tina offers, among other things, black and white repros of Mary Worth strips…
The baffling, or if not baffling then almost assuredly plot-driven bigotry of “The Closer”
In my ceaseless effort to stay two or three years behind the times I recently rented the first season of The Closer, TNT’s pride and joy, starring Kyra Sedgwick as Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, a country girl nailin’ perps like the city boys just don’t know how. In the first episode, Brenda…
Wynton Marsalis—“Cherokee”
“Cherokee,” written by English bandleader Ray Noble back in the thirties, became a bop anthem in the forties after Charlie Parker used the chord changes to create his virtuoso masterpiece, “Ko-Ko.” Here Wynton Marsalis gives the original a virtuoso workout of his own.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary. Oh, and Mark too
Back in the day, and what a day it was, too, the Washington Post comics page would stack Mary Worth, Zippy the Pinhead, and Mark Trail right one on top of one another. The Zipster’s labored, po-mo, self-referencing meta facetiousness, combined with Mark’s two-fisted, straight from the fifties outdoor action and Mary’s two-fisted, straight from…
Early Jeanne, Early Louis, Early Miles
Ever see the flick about the young Parisian car thief who steals an American convertible, find a gun in the glove compartment, kills a guy, and goes down for it? How about the one about a young couple who get involved in murder over a stolen car and fantasize about dying together with their pictures…
Oh, and one more thing. It doesn’t do anything.
Hey, iPhone users, now that you’ve got your gadget, do you need another shot of self-esteem, one that keeps on giving, like, you know, the image of a jewel on your iPhone screen, bearing the caption “I am rich?” Well, sorry, you didn’t move quick enough. You could have gotten it from Apple’s App Store,…
Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams
Pre-sellout,mid-sixties Miles with his last great quintet, the “E.S.P.” “Miles Smiles” quintet. In 1969, Davis played the Newport Jazz Festival, as he always did, a festival that had become, much to the chagrin of organizer George Wein, the Newport Jazz/Rock Festival. It was Miles’ invariable practice to arrive at the festival minutes before his set…