Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 38

Don't everybody like the taste of apple pie?

Mostly Other People Do the Killing

A great band with a great name that plays unabashed, Ornette-worthy avant-jazz. Avant, yes, but as such a bit of a throwback. Excellent stuff. And here is a video that complements their freewheeling virtuosity.

Snooki!

So, if not Pete Seeger, is there any folk music that I like? Oh yeah...

Pete Seeger, RIP

His music: not my cup of tea. But what can you say? “The key to the future of the world,” he said in 1994, “is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.” Hear, hear.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 37

In the right hands, baritone is the most expressive sax. But it takes a lot of wind just to get out the notes. At 2:52 Mr. Carter shows off a little circular breathing and bent tones. Showing off being his thing... along with beauty.

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

The preceding post made me think of the saddest, scariest, most beautiful children's book I know of. It has a happy ending, if such a thing is possible after the existential terror of the plot...

Jeremy Steig

Dick Conte played this track on KCSM today. I'd never heard it, nor--ashamed to say--heard of Mr. Steig. Not only is it the most amazing jazz flute track I've ever heard, or can even imagine hearing, but he's William Steig's son, and Margaret Mead's nephew!

Reading advice from our greatest living novelist

NY Times: If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

E.L. Doctorow: He’s a reader and doesn’t need my instruction. On the other hand, if I could require Republican members of Congress to read one book it would be Keynes’s “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”

Something tells me they wouldn't get through it...