Here come the boxes

At long last, we're finally going to be moving into our new place next week. I'm psyched.

Of course with all the packing, shuffling and settling there's going to be even less time to blog. See you in a couple of weeks.

Alternate Alto

Finally a warm breezy day in Chicago! It's been almost six months since the mercury hit 70 around here but today the streak is broken. In tangential honor of the event, please enjoy a smooth and easy alto saxophonist. Charlie Parker is likely to remain at the top of all any "best alto" list, but today I bring you my (and supposedly Parker's) favorite.

Paul Desmond, best know for his years with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. He also wrote the groups monster hit Take Five. Desmond described his approach as "wanting to sound like a dry martini." I think he pulled it off in this performance of "Three to Get Ready" from godknows what year, somewhere in the 70s.



Desmond's low-key lyrical approach to inhabiting a tune had magical results. I remember hearing his version of Paul Simon's "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" and thinking that it sounded like Simon wrote it for Desmond.

Sadly but not surprisingly, Desmond the three-pack-a-day man died of lung cancer in 1977, at the age of 52. But that's too gloomy a thought for such a beautiful day.

Further reading

• The official Paul Desmond website
  
• All About Jazz also has a fine collection of Desmond's witty remarks that includes this wisecrack about Ornette Coleman's music: "It's like living in a house where everything's painted red."

Free: Balitsaris and Bandoneon

I was on the Palmetto Records site earlier today checking out the new Bobby Watson album when I came across a couple of fine freebies:

• Bluegrass Girl, from the CD Big Black Sun by Matt Balitsaris & Jeff Berman
  This acoustic guitar and bass number (with shimmering vibes) conjures a beautiful sunrise in the woods. Reminiscent of "Under the Missouri Sky" and eminently diggable.

• Oblivion, from the CD Zonda by Conosur
  Conosur features Al Di Meola guitarist Hernan Romero and guitarist/producer Tony Viscardo leading an ensemble that also includes Weather Report percussionist Manolo Badrena. Oblivion is the group's tribute to Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla and features Argentinian bandoneon artist Raul Jaurena. Sad beautiful stuff.

• The other freebie up at the moment is a straight-ahead jazz number, which did nothing for me. Go figure.
  

Both Big Black Sun and Zonda are on sale for $8.99 which isn't free, but it is cheaper than iTunes and that's something.

TNLD says check it out.

Suess speaks (sort of)

Stop Making Movies About My Books

On the fourteenth of March, in towns nationwide / In every cinema, multiplex, on every barnside / Gleamed another adapting of one of my books / CGI-ed and digitized by another sly crook...

I have a VHS copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Someday I'll get around to buying a digital copy from iTunes or something. But as for adaptations of books by the good Doctor, that's as far as I'm prepared to go. As such, I haven't seen any of the bloated big screen adaptations to come out since Theodor Seuss Geisel was translated to a less corporeal format.

So with glee I recommend reading the Onion op-ed above.

"Why it's simply an outrage—a crime, you must judge!—
To crap on my books with this big-budget sludge.
My books are for children to learn ones and twos in,
Not commercialous slop for Jim Carrey to ruin."

Geisel's widow Audrey gets roughed up near the end, but else what's a First Amendment for? Besides, April is supposedly "the cruelest month" and National Poetry Month, to boot.

Then I recommend buying one of the actual books.

City folk

I've heard it said that Chicago is like New York but with nicer people. Having lived in both places and approaching the six month mark of my Chicagoland residence, I'd say that in general the description fits. (There are assholes everywhere, after all, and, yes, I am talking about the pituitary case who manages that motel just off I-80 in Youngstown, Ohio).

As an illustration, take the image above, the snapping of which required me to stand in the middle of a busy sidewalk in the Loop and strike a number of modern dance poses. Most of the passersby gave me what felt like a polite berth and kept moving. In New York (by which I mean Manhattan), I would have expected to get an aggrieved berth accompanied by an annoyed grunt or possibly a remark.

I loved living in New York, but I always suspected that people occasionally stepped in front of cabs so they could let loose with a Ratzo Rizzo "I'm walkin' here!" My own crackpot theory about this is that there's something about the crush of humanity on the island combined with the awareness that so many people want your space (despite the fact that their space is probably so much better than yours ever will be) that results in a kind of neurotic territoriality.

One time I took a date to a movie on the Upper West Side. The place wasn't even a quarter full when my companion and I arrived and we were standing near the back trying to decide how close to the screen to sit when a woman in her 60s approached us and barked, "Excuse me!" I moved aside so she could enter the empty row I had been unintentionally blocking. We watched her shuffle along that empty row (one of at least a dozen on that side of the theater) until she got to the center aisle, which she then followed to the treasured and magical seat down front, the one she had earned by asserting hierarchy over me and my date. We shrugged. The movie looked fine from where we sat.

Whereabouts

The decent fellow who poses as the crusty blogger XO recently posted a post about the lessons he's learned in two years of blogging. They're worth reading, as is XO, generally. So go ahead and do that some time.

My point in posting today (and I purposely waited a day so this wouldn't come off as an April Fool's post) is to fess up to breaking Lesson #9:

Lesson #9 - POST! To paraphrase an old axiom "Bloggers blog." No one is going to add you to their Google Reader if you only post a couple of times a year. WRITE GODDAMNIT! Nobody is going to read a blog that only gets updated when the seasons change.

This brings up several issues:

• I don't know if you can "break" a lesson, but I respect your pedantry.
• It hadn't occurred to me that I might be on anyone's Google Reader.
• Spellcheck notwithstanding, I support the presence of the N in "GODDAMNIT!" I also support pronouncing the N sound which results in a satisfying Yosemite Sam impersonation if you say the word with sufficient vim.
• I wholeheartedly support Yosemite Sam impersonations. And adverbs.
  
• I actually have been writing quite a bit recently, although most of it has been on paper, which seems deliberately obscurantist but wasn't intended as such. It's just that I still have a thing for pens and paper. I'd take an hour in a good stationers over a museum anytime.
  
• There have been numerous things posted over at Oddment of Sandwiches, but let's face it that thing really isn't technically a blog, but more of a sheep in blog's clothing.
  

Still, it would have been considerate of me to inform all five of my readers when I felt this most recent hiatus coming on.

So, sorry about that. And as they used to say on the Carson show: More to come.

Dennis Irwin on the bass

Video: Matt Wilson's Arts & Crafts performing Pat Metheney's "The Bat."

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Bassist Dennis Irwin passed on March 10th, just a few hours before a benefit concert held at Jazz at Lincoln Center to raise money for his battle with cancer. His brother Dave recounts the concert on his blog. It sounds like an amazing show: Jon Hendricks, Mose Allison, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett, and John Scofield among many others. You have to hope that the bassist's departure secured him a front row seat.

Darcy James Argue has collected a fine list of Irwin tributes and memorials on his blog and they are all worth reading.

I saw Irwin play with Matt Wilson's Arts & Crafts at the Blue Room in Kansas City last year. In addition to generously anchoring the ensemble with his work on bass, he also broke out a clarinet for a couple of numbers. In my post about the show, I described it as feeling like a house party. This intimacy is one of the many advantages that small clubs have over festivals and larger venues. Proximity to the musicians is particularly helpful with a music that has never been primarily about volume.

I went to the show mostly on the strength of the buzz around Wilson and because I'd been intrigued and wowed several recordings featuring the ensemble's keyboard wiz Gary Versace. They were both outstanding, as was trumpeter Terrell Stafford. Sitting there a piano's length from the bandstand I could see how intently all three of them listened when Irwin soloed. Several times all three of them would nod in unison at things that I couldn't hear.

So one of the lessons I took away from hearing Dennis Irwin play how much I still don't know. That's almost always a good thing, in life or art.