Recent Posts
Bob Florence dies at 75
I’ve just heard that Bob Florence died Thursday night, 5 days before his 76th birthday.
Continue reading...How well do you tell your story?
I’ve lived in Brazil now for 5 years. When I came here I spoke virtually no Portuguese whatsoever. Hello, please and thank you was about it. Obviously to make my self understood I had to learn, very quickly. After a year or so I could hold a conversation quite well and although my vocabulary wasn’t [...]
Continue reading...Introducing the Judy Carmichael Septet
I’m taking a break from catching up on emails and I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you a bit about the band and the musicians therein because there are some names that you may not be familiar with. … That the band is going to be good, and put on a superb show goes with out saying - it is made up of THE best swing musicians in the world and led by the worlds leading stride pianist, Judy Carmichael .
Continue reading...Twitter not
Just a quickie. Back at home for day in the middle of the tour with Judy Carmichael. I was messing around with Twitter a while ago and finally signed up a few days before the tour started - the idea being to ‘Twitter’ away on the road and use them as small blogs. However, due [...]
Continue reading...Web 2.0 - part 1
I’ve had a few emails from musicians who didn’t really know much about the tools and ideas I talked about in my last newsletter. I thought I was well behind in this new movement but it seems there are many musicians, especially in the jazz world, who aren’t sure what is going on. I’m going [...]
Continue reading...The passing of another master
It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Jimmy Giuffre. He died on April 24th, 2 days before his 87th birthday.
Jimmy was one of the great individualists of the clarinet, always inventing and thinking outside the norm. His later, free playing unfortunately took him out of the mainstream jazz world but he [...]
Good old showmanship
I’ve just read an interesting article in the New York Times today on Juan Diego Flórez’ performance at the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday. He performed a solo encore after a standing ovation - something not heard there since 1994. In fact, solo encores were common in the 19th century but as the opera grew [...]
Continue reading...Test
This is just a test post to check some behind the scenes fiddling I’ve been doing.
While I’m here though I have to mention Dave Frishberg’s great site. Go to his Written Word section and have a look around. There are some lovely stories here, I particularly love the Ben Webster and Kenny Davern ones! [...]
Flickr test
Messing around with Flickr feeds and plugins. This one seems to work ok. I was on holiday last week up in Bahia. Mum came over with my Aunt as well, and spent 7 days sunning ourselves and playing with my daughter. What a great way to spend your holidays. Except for the small mishap when [...]
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