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Showing posts from October, 2009

The Line-Up 10-30-2009 by retronius

Herein lies my radio show for October 30th, 2009. It should be here for a little while. I'm trying to do what I can to get this out better and I hope you have a clearer idea of what I do. Oh, and it's really hard to make a Halloween themed jazz show. Quincy Jones - Theme from "Ironside" Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Tide of Trepidation Chick Corea - The Great Pumpkin Waltz Justin Vasquez - Invitation Grant Green - In the Middle Christian McBride - Say Something Miles Davis - Spanish Key The Bad Plus - Iron Man

The Line-Up 10-23-2009 by retronius

I've found a better way to post past episodes of my show. In time, I hope to have all of them here. This is last week's show but tonight's show will be live in a couple of hours and I hope to probably have the stream of it here tomorrow. I'll also post the list of tracks here soon as well.

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme  put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list .  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this

Late Deference to Taste and the Re-Imagining of the Big Band

For a preposterously long time, I've held to a rather peculiar rule as it relates to music recommendations. All recommendations that come from friends are ignored for at least three months. For example, a friend of mine told me about a year ago, "Hey, you should check out Esperanza Spalding ." I gave my usual, "Um... yeah. Sure." Shrugged the whole thing off and continued on my merry way. Time passes and she's playing the Newport Jazz Festival this past summer and I decided to give her set a listen on NPR. Sure enough, my friend was right and now I pay her attention. I've even played her a few times on my radio show . The thing is, it took over a year for his wise words to sink in, partially because I like discovering stuff on my own or through the internet. As our parents always say, "Oh, so you won't listen to me but you'll do whatever your little nappy-headed friends will say!" (Okay, so maybe not all our parents say that.)

Morehouse Puts Its Freshly Polished, Stacy Adams-Covered Foot Down

A few friends of mine have called me to the carpet on a certain issue pertaining my alma mater, Morehouse College. The school that I so dearly love is instituting a new dress code this month. While I saw many of my fellow alums complain vehemently about the new dress code, I frankly didn't care much about it. I felt like many upper middle class Americans in their 40s and have well-paid jobs with health benefits. Huh? What do you mean there are 25-30 million people who don't have healthcare in America? They're probably just lazy and not suffering as a result of a price-gouging system and the worst economic conditions since the 1930s. Like a libertarian, I simply thought, "I got mine, and I don't care who hasn't gotten his yet." But as time wore on, friends of mine have wondered what I thought on the subject, and the more I thought about this new " appropriate attire policy ," the more I thought how wrong this was. Of course, I'm not th

The Rape Tunnel

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A good friend of mine sent me an article that he wanted me to blog about. Frankly, I had a lot on my mind at the moment to write here and I'll be sure to have those ideas here soon, but after sitting with the idea for a little while, this post sort of wrote itself in my head. What is a rather shocking, terrible subject just sort of came out as preposterously humorous to me. I hope you share the same sentiment, otherwise this may get a little uncomfortable. ---------------------------------------------------- Richard Whitehurst of Columbus, Ohio, is working on his next artistic piece to open at the William Strunk, Jr. Museum of Contemporary Art in Akron. This piece is... get ready now... The Rape Tunnel . Those who crawl into the 22-foot long, steadily shrinking tunnel will eventually find themselves in a small room in which Whitehurst will do all he can to rape those who cross his one-way path. Ooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooo Whitehurst claims he's undertaking this work