Since You Asked

Until around the middle of the last century, a very significant portion of popular music consumption involved buying sheet music and having your talented child play it on the spinet in the parlor.  The covers of these pieces were often graphically arresting, for obvious purposes--the gaudier the cover, the more it stood out from the competition.  They were the LP sleeves of their day, and were often quite creative with a one- or two-color pass over black type. Here is a random selection of sheet music my mother accrued throughout her long life.  I'm scanning these before tossing them out, and before you call me a soulless philistine and culture killer, please keep in mind a few things: These are all originals, some date back into the 1930s and may have been printed in the 20s.  They are disintegrating as we speak. Piano reductions, as nearly all sheet music of the popular songs of the day were, are nearly always terrible representations of the song--the melody has to...

  WHAT I LEARNED FROM HARRY POTTER (An appreciation of teachers) There is a spell That can read a magic wand Calm a snarling book Encourage coffee to stay hot  And correct the hands Of a wayward clock. But in the Muggle world We can only smile and laugh And try to nurture those boys and girls Who wish to understand The magic metronome of life Hungry to learn to count the clicks.

By the time I had the pleasure of working with Val Valentin in the mid eighties, I knew him only as the nice, white-haired Venezuelan gentleman who handed Ed McMahon his mic as he came onstage to emcee Star Search. That's Val to Sammy's left wearing the suit and tie. I was young and a bit dense and had no idea the guy was an extreme heavyweight in the recording world. Today online I've seen references claiming Val and Rudy Van Gelder were arguably the two most important jazz recording engineers ever, but back then all I knew about him was that he was friends with Ed Greene, and pleasant to work with. He was also an engineer at Verve Records during their heyday in the late fifties and early sixties, eventually running the engineering side of the label. Several LPs regularly come up when serious vinyl devotees engage in the "you gotta have this one" game. The Soul of Ben Webster often gets mentioned, along with Coltrane's Giant Steps, but one bl...

Nice thing about abandoning any supernatural beliefs: you get to decide for yourself every morning what the meaning of life is. Mostly it's exactly the same as before, i. e. participation in H. Sapiens Sapiens' ongoing attempt to fight entropy uphill for a time. But sometimes it's special--sometimes the meaning of life is spending all day preparing a meal for the members of one's immediate tribe, sometimes it's letting your selfish muse lock you in a tiny room for 12 hours in search of the lost chord.  There are infinitely more ways for things to go wrong in the maintenance of life (human or otherwise) than for things to go right. The universe (substitute Mother Nature here if you wish) doesn't really care if you live or die, and definitely has the deck stacked against you.  What then binds all us language-enabled primates together? Well, if you have ever experienced any aspect of physical pain at all, you are likely part of the huge volunteer army tryi...

American society is in fact the direct antithesis of Judeo/Christian values. We reject blind obedience to authority (no other gods before me).  We challenge arbitrary limits on free speech (take thy name in vain).  We do not recognize thought crime (thou shalt not covet).  The basic tension in the founding documents is that a set of unalienable human rights exists, but it is up to citizens, through government, to realize them. No matter what this bozo or this one says.

For the three of you who will care about this, here’s the birdseye lowdown about my tentative journey back into the land of tubes and vinyl. First, the ground rules. I will not be dragged into any arguments about the quality of experience of vinyl versus digital, tubes versus transistors, active versus passive, coaxial versus component. In each of these controversies I have held unshakeable convictions only to have them dashed to pieces in the harsh sunlight of experiment, and the only thing I can say for sure is that everything—from the choice of microphones, to whether the musicians had breakfast, to whether the balance engineer actually understood the emotional underpinnings of the music, to whether the listener had breakfast—affects how recorded music is perceived. I only offer my observations from a lifetime spent listening and mixing in a mostly vain attempt to coax the ghosts out of the hidden spaces. Second, a disclaimer. Mine is not by any standard even a lower-mid-level a...

A selection from the Jayhawker magazine 1946-48. These were the inside front and back covers--not even Coca-Cola came up with the dosh the cigarette companies did.  First up, Chesterfield. They go for the very upscale Hollywood endorsements with mentions of the latest movie appearances. Dorothy Lamour Hitchcock movie I've never even heard of, to my shame.  I wonder who the heck Valli was. Basil Rathbone Ann Sheridan Chesterfield used a number of approaches, among them sports celeb endorsements.   I note that Ted Williams isn't actually smoking a Chesterfield.  DiMaggio was a handsome devil. Apparently the cigarette lady was your average girl-next-door who looked suspiciously like Ann Sheridan. That's what Dad wants!  A carton of Chesterfields with a ribbon on it from Junior. Alan Hale (The Skipper's Dad) And of course there's always Santa.  Unfortunately Chesterfield didn't have an exclusive with th...