Quick wrap-up of recent published pieces and radio segments

Wednesday 8/25/21

Doing this bang-bang quick. Ain't got time to stop and tarry. Just ran another 3000 stairs. I sent the Edith Wharton review of her 1937 collection, Ghosts, to the Times Literary Supplement.

All of this is in the News section--or will be within moments--so if one follows along there, there's not much new here. But let's be thorough.

This is a recent piece in JazzTimes on bassist Scott LaFaro, and the music he made before his untimely death apart from the Bill Evans Trio. The LaFaro family was much moved, and reached out to me, which I appreciated.

This is a new essay in The Smart Set on Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, and jazz itself. Here's a Downtown radio segment in which I talk about a new personal essay of mine in Salmagundi about running stairs; John Huston's Key Largo; Ritchie Valens' only live album; and the five best Red Sox players of all-time.

Here's another Downtown segment, covering those LaFaro and Morrison pieces, the real key to any quality writing, a useless literary agent I had, baseball, a Bob Dylan show from Philly in 1964, The Golden Girls, the Rolling Stones at Leeds University in 1971, and the 1953 sci-fi film, Invaders from Mars.

This is the Downtown segment from last night, touching on John Coltrane, the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" (my bad, by the way--the version being focused on here is the 2/13/70 performance from the Fillmore East), M.R. James's short story "The Mezzotint" and a reading of it by Michael Hordern, the 1957 film The Monolith Monsters, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and Charlie Watts.

This is an op-ed in the New York Daily News on the name change for Cleveland's baseball team. And finally here is a new feature in JazzTimes on John Coltrane's Ascension album. Pieces like this one and the LaFaro will be in my book, The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Foundational, Timeless Power.