Running tomorrow

There isn't a damn thing I wouldn't do for Aldina Duarte when she's doing this.

Aldina Duarte distilling fado to its essence and stirring my soul.

Fado at the source

Carminho tarting up and singing about Mouraria, wellspring of fado. I need to trod those steps again. Carminho needs to put out another CD.

Future muse

So I don't know if Bjork's iPad album/app Biophilia is the future of pay-for music, but I do know listening to, watching, playing with it would be hell on wheels if I still knew where to get a hit of Thai stick in 2011, if they even have Thai stick in 2011.

Esperanza Spalding, Esperanza, Heads Up

I saw her Chamber Music Society for the second time this week and it was wonderful just like the first time. The most accessible Third Stream-style mix of jazz and classical forms in some time and I may be doing it something of an injustice characterizing it that way. In many respects, it is pathbreaking music. You gotta be doing something unusual to derail the Bieber juggernaut for a Grammy.

As much as I appreciate Chamber Music Society, the performances and the CD, this is my favorite Esparanza set so far (I mean, we only have three CDs and she should have a long way to go being, basically, a kid). From 2008, the focus is on her considerable ability as a jazz musician, singing, and even more importantly, as a magnificent bassist. If tunes like Espera don't get your heart going pitter-patter, you may be dead. Art Blakey would have been down with hard-bopper If That's True, which works Donald Harrison in on alto sax. Mingus would have dug it all.

Giants

Whenever I hear John Coltrane play Giant Steps I think, he had to be an extraterrestrial who dropped in for a visit, heard Charle Parker play, became enamored of jazz and stuck around to blow for the love of it until the extraterrestrial bigwigs made him come home.

Kind of like that X-Files episode The Unnatural with the Negro Leagues baseball player from outer space.

The end

Finishing the Wabash Heritage Trail 15K on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2011.

I felt kind of bad about passing the guy behind me near the end.

But if I hadn't, then he would have been the top dude in the 50-59 age group, not me. That's why they call it a race, I guess.

Running just as fast as we can

Time for first 15k on Aug. 6, 2:02:33

Time for 15k today, 1:34:41. Slow but headed in the right direction, more or less quickly. I even passed a guy at the end to finish first in my age group. Then I felt kind of bad about it, although I kept the medal.

The pleasure is in the run, not the finish, and both runs were a pleasure. (I have to say the cool October run was a little more pleasurable for my body than the hot and humid August run, however.)

Next up, Monumental Half Marathon in Indianapolis Nov. 5.

Gigi Gryce, Doin' the Gigi, Uptown

George General Grice, Jr., AKA Gigi Gryce and Basheer Qusim, got sick of the music business early in the 1960s and went into teaching disadvantaged and troubled kids using music as a tool. When he died in 1983, too young at 57, they named a school after him. So he left a heck of a legacy.

What he didn't leave was a big recorded legacy and while his students are richer for the career change, those of us who appreciate the music of a gifted alto sax player, composer and arranger admired by his peers could be excused for ruing it, if just a little. However, we're richer now, too, thanks to this collection of never-before-released cuts from studio demos and live radio and TV sessions (with good sound throughout).

We get some of Gryce's compositions, but what I really like about it is his rearranging of some well-chewed standards, which renders, for instance, Take the A Train and Stompin' at the Savoy in a way that retains the essence of the originals while sounding like almost entirely new songs. Gryce is in excellent form on both those cuts, and most of the others as well, making me think of Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt (on alto) here and Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges there, while nonetheless always being Gigi.

The other revelation to me is trumpeter Richard Williams, who appears on most of the tracks. He's every bit of Kenny Dorham and Donald Byrd (another bandmate of Gryce's) and also died too young, of cancer at 54 (this I do not like).

Ranges from classic bebop to sophisticated stuff akin to the modal productions of Miles Davis around the same time, all of it good for many listens right out of the box.

Nothing to fear, but fear

"Fear. It's the oldest tool of power. If you're distracted by the fear of those around you, it keeps you from seeing the actions of those above."

-- Fox Mulder

Gee, why didn't the Koch brothers think of that?

Never mind.

What Pops said

"What's money anyhow? You make it and you might eat a little better than the next cat. You might buy a little better booze. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is."

-- Louis Armstrong

Amen daddy!

Ana Popovic, Unconditional, Eclecto Groove

Ana Popovic sings a little like Big Mama Thornton (and Helen Reddy) and plays the guitar a little like Stevie Ray Vaughan (and Robert Cray), which is kind of weird when you consider she's from Belgrade, and I don't mean the one near St. Louis, or even the ones in Maine and Montana. Still, you know it's true, music is a universal language and I might say the blues is universal, too.

In any event, Count Me In and Soulful Dress are going into the running playlist Mix 26.2 because you hear them and the feet must move. Sonny Landreth adds a second slide on one tune and there's some b-a-d bad organ and harp playing in the bargain. It's all good.

Danielle Ate the Sandwich sings her excellent song American Dream with some kids/fans from North Carolina.

Amusing Danielle Ate the Sandwich video. They blew her off in Kentucky so I got to see her in Indianapolis. Her voice is even more wonderful in person. The CD is her latest, Two Bedroom Apartment, and it's boffo.

Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter, Fat Possum Records

Townes Van Zandt wasn't a stunning guitar player and his singing voice wasn't all that great but, man, he could play and sing. And write lyrics that melt your heart and stir your soul and can feel so sad even when they're funny, like Talking Thunderbird Blues.

Country blues, maybe not officially, although I'm not uncomfortable classifying it that way given tunes such as Chauffer's Blues, which could have come right from the Delta. Call it Country and Western Folk meets the Blues Folk, and a copacetic meeting it is.

And I don't mean in a Halloween way

The Way the Whole Thing Ends on Gillian Welch's The Harrow & The Harvest, Acony, is about the most haunting (new) tune I've heard in a good long while. She may be a folkie, but I hear some Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday in there, not to mention some Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt, with a nicer voice but no less emotive.

Really good guitar playing as well.

The murder of Troy Davis by Georgia got me thinking

"Whether the trial witnesses against him were lying then or are lying now, by fighting against his requested relief Georgia is saying that its interest in the finality of its capital judgments is more important than the accuracy of its capital verdicts."

-- From a thoughtful Atlantic piece by Andrew Cohen.

So if government is "bad" when it taxes you, what about when it kills you, and with more than a "reasonable doubt" that you did the thing for which you're being killed? Why aren't John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, et al, stepping up to the plate on that issue?

Of course, we know where Rick "Serial Executionier" Perry stands.

Saudade on Sept. 11

This evening I am listening to Portuguese fado music. The fado is rooted in the concept of saudade, loosely translated an intense longing for things lost. Lives, for instance, thousands on this day 10 years ago, hundreds of thousands since, mostly without purpose. Or the rule of law that says one may not be held indefinitely without a trial by a jury of one's peers, or even without being charged with any crime at all. Or the idea that a person should be judged on content of character, not choice of church or of headdress. Or the right to communicate and/or travel freely without being surveilled by the CIA and the New York City police and strip searched, virtually or literally. Or the notion that state-sanctioned assassination inevitably leads to more problems than it solves. These, and an economy devastated by 10 years of ill-advised and ineffective war, are the wages of 9/11, or, rather, our reaction to it. Celebrate that.

Like The Mule was sayin'

"You can't know too much. It ain't no shame if you know a whole lot. But it's a shame if you don't know nothing."

Good advice from Henry Townsend on Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen. Just before he gets down to killing on If I Asked You.

I can think of several congresspersons who should apply the lesson.