tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56496123101578304062012-01-11T11:00:16.049-05:00... (WITH SUGGESTED WINE PAIRINGS) ... THIS BLOG WAS RETIRED AFTER THE LATEST POST HERE. I'M STILL LISTENING TO WINE AND TASTING JAZZ, I'D JUST RATHER WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. BUT I'LL LEAVE THIS UP AND HOPE YOU ENJOY!Let the products sell themselves!http://www.blogger.com/profile/01770102474301409235noreply@blogger.comBlogger401100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5649612310157830406.post-79716894011525348152010-04-07T16:48:00.004-04:002010-04-07T17:12:06.892-04:00

Every time it rains our new lawn becomes a new bayou. Puddles form everywhere until the whole damn place is just one puddle, a great lake. This probably has to do with the thick clay consistency of the soils in this part of the world, the fact that where once stood cities used to be the bottom of a glacier that once melted, once receded, once left five giant interconnected puddles that some

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This is one of few reviews of this album on the internet, but you know, this is the best one out there. Once Junior Mance hits his solo on "Straight, No Chaser," you also know something else: classic. And once the tenors start talking... but everything ain't just two dudes talking. My place in time is a big-nada history, but my place with you is shown symbolically.Suggested Wine Pairing: To

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Friday night dinner is not on Thursday or Sunday or Monday. Saturday dinner is a formal affair, you have friends coming over so you plan out a five or six course feast using every utensil in the cabinet. Sunday is roasted something or other with potatoes and gravy, just like grandma used to make. Wednesday is the middle of the week and you're tired of leftovers from Monday and Tuesday. But

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Best to observe how the musicians don't play. Of course, you want them to go off, but there's also joy to be found in watching dudes sit out, especially if dude's the leader. Somewhere somehow someone started a thought: The group began to think it out: Once they started thinking the leader put her/his two cents down and now s/he wants to listen to what the others have to say. How are we

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Well well well... A long time coming. The bad news is that I haven't been able to blog the Jazz du Terroir for many moons. The good news is that I may have discovered how to podcast in the meantime. If this works, you'll hear ten or so of my fave free jazz tracks (or tracks approximating the free).The list:Spoken IntroDavid Murray, "The Fast Life" (from Ming)Albert Ayler, "Ghosts: First

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Who would we be without ghosts? They don't exist, precisely the point. I'll explain better: Every time Nirmala has read my cards, I realize that I believe not a bit in the Tarot. This makes the correctness of her divinations of my future all the more enjoyable when they come to pass. I have two explanations for this phenomenon. First, in any given situation, there are only a limited number

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Some times you need Finnegan's Wake. But not oftentimes. You need Joyce, the world needs Joyce. But some times you want John Updike. Some times you need Eugene Ionesco, but some times you want Tennessee Williams. Some times you need Duchamp, but some times you want John Singer Sargent. Some times you need Vallejo, but some times you want Neruda. Some times you need Pierre Ferrand Selection

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Apologies for the delay in getting posts up on Jazz du Terroir. Over the past several weeks I've been secluded for the most part, immersing myself in Walter Benjamin and high-end avant-garde Brazilian pornography. (Alas, there are worse fates.) In any event, as a result this has turned into a slow-blog, and no one likes the slow-blog. New posts later tonite.In the meantime, might I recommend

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On the way to 2009, Ania and I asked the wine seller to pick the perfect wine to bid farewell to the old year and bring in the new. He landed on a California Cabernet grown on hillside of dark, glassy rock, so steep that it was almost a cliff and nearly inaccessible. This produced gnarled, thorny vine from which very few fruits sprung, thick-skinned and filled with bejeweled incandescent juice.

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Say what? Punctus contra punctum. My man John Rahn (Music Inside Out, 2000): "It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must

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5:30pm. And I wonder where I'm driving. I notice that the time of day has changed. Whereas in summer I would be looking forward to a long afternoon, in winter it might as well be midnight except for all the suits driving home from wherever it is they work. At least they're driving home. They stayed at home all weekend putting up their Christmas tree, hanging round metallic ornaments, and

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There was a time back in the 80s when a nothing bespoke class and sophistication more than a glass of Merlot. If Krystle Carrington poured Blake Carrington a Manhattan in 1981, by 1984 she was throwing a glass of Merlot at Alexis. That's class. As in, my American grandmother would have found this all terribly "posh," because you know, "they're millionaires." My dear Grandma also found the

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Let me tell you something about the earth. The earth is what you pour in your glass. Get it in the right glass, and you can put your nose up to the rim. At first you think, is the glass itself I'm smelling? a known unknown caught somewhere between sand and fresh riverwater? The more it saturates your sinuses, you realize that you are smelling the clay pebbles of some country road in a valley of

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On a lark I put this CD into our bedroom alarm clock one evening, under the assumption that waking up to the clock chimes of "If I Were a Bell" would instantly put us into the jazziest of jazz moods, everyday from here to eternity. After about a week I realized several things: 1) Waking up to the same chord progressions day after day, morning after morning, snooze after snooze, turns hellish

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Who came first: Tony Williams, or the Ocean? A deceptive question, but think on it a bit. When the waves crash, do they not sound just like Tony's crash? Who or what is your point of reference? While you ponder, I will tell you a story: Once upon a time I washed up on an Honduran island. I don't remember too much about it, other than it being surrounded by barracudas and sea turtles, and swarming

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Like my friend Paul used to say back in the 80s, "I ain't no connoisseur cat / What kinda sewer is that?"  You know what else he used to say?  "I didn't come here to fight / Hey, unless if that is white!"  By which Paul meant, beer is for breakfast, but wine is for Sunday.  And every other day of the week, too, I'm guessing, even on the skyway.  So what's the "Red" stand for?  It's the historical

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Ania has a particular kind of wine that's hers. She's not adverse to the super-expensive, incredibly refined vintage, of course. But for day-in day-out sipping pleasure, it's got to be deeply red, rich, full of tannins, smooth, and well, delicious but not so damned refined. This reminds me of the last few times I've played Coltrane's "Sun Ship" or Cecil Taylor Unit, you know, I really love that

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He could play anything he wants, really. Could play cowboys and indians for all I care. In some saloon with a bunch of drunken cowboys, strides up to the piano and takes requests. Some smelly cowhand named Rex asks for a waltz by Strauss, so he plays a few bars, and getting bored with that plays Strauss as if played by Jelly Roll Morton, and not content with that plays Strauss-Jelly Roll as a 9

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Not too much Mingus all at once, but then again one can never have enough too much Mingus. Just a quick note for a long, gorgeous, wish it would never end performance with Dolphy, Booker Ervin, and Bud Powell. I could swear Mingus is singing throughout its entirety, but for the life of me I can never figure out exactly what he's singing. Only that he's singing, about passion. If you grab a bottle

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So where does travelling in wine take us today? Sacred profanity or the profane sacrament? Is the path to freedom righteous or leftist? When she walked into church he didn't know what to make of her. Tuba swinging right and left, like the trombone and trumpet throbbing through the right ear, saxes dropping out of left channel. There but for all gods and devils to see. This reminded him of story

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Let us bow our heads and raise our glasses... There are those for whom life was a promise, one that time (too little) could not keep. For others, though, time took its time. You knew what you needed to do, so you did it. In your own time. If the world does not see what you're doing, you go to Bordeaux. You need to do what you need to do. If the world is olive, you refract. If it doesn't refract,

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After the rain... You want music for the first day of fall. Or not fall exactly, but that first day of fall just after summer. But not that exactly either, the first day of fall when it still feels like summer. Not summer exactly, that is, maybe the last day of summer when it still feels like summer and you can feel fall coming on in the air, when you can picture the change of autumn leaves.

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It's been hot as hell and you just don't know if you're going to take it any more. The air's so thick with humidity that you have to cut it with a butter knife just to open your refrigerator door. Not that you need anything in there, it's just the only reasonably cool place to lay your head. But you can't do that forever, the machine would inevitably break down that way and you'd look like a fool

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Why? The letter pre-dates human history. As in, if you are going to write history, you need something to write it with. That's logical. As logical as saying, if you want to recover history, you may need to shred books and libraries, stripping them down to the mere letter, since the letter is where history began. Why? As in, when Nirmala moved up to Michigan from New Orleans, she could never get

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Of anything with a soft glow, a list of my favorites: Ripe peaches, Pacific Ocean sunsets, EL34 vacuum tubes, a snifter of Calvados in your belly on an autumn evening, cheese souffle just out of the oven, chocolate souffle just out of the oven, novels by Machado de Assis, the texture of dark chocolate and/or strawberry jam, the coastal landscapes of Central California, Chile, Spain, or France (

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Special Guest Posting (unconsciously so) by Jeffrey B. Wagman and David B. Miller, from "Nested Reciprocities: The Organism-Environment System in Perception-Action and Development" (Developmental Psychobiology 42 (2003): 317-334):An additional primary tenet of the ecological approach to perception is that at the ecological scale, organisms and environments are both highly nested entities. Within

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Someone said the piano player's got history in his hands. And I've got no qualms with that assertion. Some times it's hard not to hear Cecil Taylor or Keith Jarrett or Andrew Hill (especially Andrew Hill), and once you've heard that it's hard not to pull it back to Monk and then Tatum and then Jelly Roll, and then all of a sudden you're in some tavern hearing ragtime circa 1878. In the age of

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I've never cared about the thing in-itself, because the thing-in-itself has never existed. Some thing is always next to something else. The relation in-between them may be volatile, mutable, hard to handle. But the in-between is always that mysterious space of change, where things can happen, where they begin to hold interest. One night in the "old town" of Warsaw we happened into a dark

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But enough with history. We get enough history as it is. What is the sense of things? The groove or vibe that does nothing, produces nothing, but most definitely is. Time was in the not-so-distant past you were out back on the deck in late summer. The sun had pounded all day and it was so humid that you felt like you were boiling in a thermo-sealed bag at the bottom of some pot you couldn't jump

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I felt bad about ripping on Wynton earlier on, and though my rip was right on the money (if I do say so my bad-self), the only way I could make it up was a double-review. Proof positive that I don't hate the 80s - I love the 80s, just not the VH1 docu-smut version of it. The David Murray 80s. Who knew back then that while we were wearing our day-glo Gotcha's and saving our pennies for the next

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I recently saw a late-night re-run of "A Different World," that spin-off from the Cosby Show circa 1987 or 1988 about the historically black college. I was surprised that it wasn't totally awful. It had its heart in the right place, a good message (tolerance, self-respect, compassion), and say what you will about him, turns out Sinbad isn't that bad an actor. All the same, I couldn't help but

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Late night. You came back from the party exhausted. Something hadn't gone quite right. You ran into someone you didn't expect and didn't want to see (an ex-lover? a colleague from work? an obnoxiously drunk pro-life republican?). And though it wasn't a complete catastrophe, some times you just feel like life just gives you a glancing blow to remind you not to get too excited about it. Even

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Many fantasize about cars or money, but on Sunday I dream of breakfast. Before opening the paper I compile a list: bread (bolillos or pão francês), butter, red currant jam, smoked fish, chopped liver, poached eggs, tomatoes, fresh peaches, yogurt (Polish or Dutch), farmhouse gouda. Ania brews a pot of coffee, grabs some cups and wine flutes from the cabinet, and decides that we are not doing

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This might be an odd choice for a first entry on Stanko. The group is a unique assemblage: trumpet, bass clarinet, drums, bass, violin, bandoneon. The result can only be described as a hybrid of Piazzola milongas, Dvorak quartets, and Gil Evans-era Miles, with a small dash of Mingus Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. In fact, this album is an extended meditation on breath control, and not just from

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Everything about this album is exquisite, from the cover image of Duke set against the arabesque, to the clarity of the recording itself, to every note that comes from Clark Terry's flugelhorn and Sam Woodyard's drum solo on "Hi Fi Fo Fum." But what grabs me every time is the Duke himself. Most everyone thinks of him only as a composer and conductor, but his piano (esp. on the opening of "Rockin'

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Love of wine is only properly expressed in its sharing-with-others, in its bringing one together with friends/family at one moment for a brief duration. The wine is the tactile, sensory embodiment of the relation in-between individuals, by which a society (social consciousness) emerges. But the wine does not solely exist in the duration of the now; it is also the living embodiment of the past.

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Things have a way of falling together if you let them. Like the time you were in New Orleans (post-Katrina, with a hole in your heart) and you walked down Magazine Street with Ania and Jenny Alonso. You dropped into a wine store just to see what they had there, picked up a bottle South African Petit Chenin. You had the salesgirl there put it in the refrigerator as the three of you went up the

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A singular achievement of 60s jazz, Astigmatic stands with E.S.P. and Out to Lunch and yes, I'll say it here, A Love Supreme as one of the best albums of the decade. Compared to those discs, Komeda crafts psychoanalysis jazz based on refracted structural images. Vague ideas float in from a haze, cut at acute angles, then come into focus and dissipate back into the ether. Compositional structure

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OK, let's just get this one out of the way. Greatest ever. If you haven't heard this album, then stop reading now. No point conversing. For the rest of us, this is where we started and remarkably, it stands to infinitely repeated listenings. A true blue friend, and while it might not always excite you (sometimes it does) it's always there when you need it. And the Bill Evans liner notes are

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Where to start READ:JAZZ? The obvious choices would have been Louis Armstrong or Miles, but this shouldn't be about the obvious. I like this Retrieval set of Freddie Keppard because I don't know it that well, having just bought it this morning. Good that way, since I don't have any critical attachment to it, and no one needs yet another jazz critic. (There will never be anyone better than Amiri

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