Tom Storer

Is that Martino's Wes Montgomery Tribute Project? That's how he's billing himself for a March 9 concert here in Paris (for which I have my ticket). Be sure to post a review!

Actually, I think Wynton probably did a good job of providing a comfortably swinging, bluesy backdrop to Willie. I mean, blues and standards are what each of them do, right? Willie doesn't need a cutting-edge modern jazz group, he needs a few pros who can play the blues behind a singer. I'd be surprised if Wynton's quintet didn't fit that bill fine. One reason I think so is that I heard a recording of the Wynton septet backing Bob Dylan on a couple of Dylan tunes--it worked much better than you would think.

I was annoyed when the format changed to CD because I didn't want to have to spend money on a CD player. On the other hand, vinyl was getting worse and worse. I used to buy an LP, immediately tape it, and then listen to the tape, because the vinyl was so quickly damaged just by normal playing. So I was happy to be able to just buy the music and listen to it without further operations. And let's face it, digital music has many advantages we would be unhappy to do without now. Which is not to say that the music industry's motives were not purely venal.

CROAK. RIBIT.

D'OH! [slaps forehead] I got Clifford Thornton and Clifford Jarvis confused. But obviously Jarvis loaned Thornton his drum set that day. I wouldn't be surprised if we find a companion picture of Clifford Jarvis playing trombone. Or--wait--was it tenor sax? No, that was Clifford Brown. Unless it was Clifford Jordan on trumpet?

Since you asked... Your first sentence should read: "Welcome to the wacky world of Organissimo; stick around, it gets even better!" A semi-colon is usually preferable to the dash. If you must employ the dash, then you should have put a space between it and the word "organissimo." You should have two spaces between a punctuation mark that ends a sentence (such as an exclamation point) and the first word in the next sentence. I beg to differ! Using the em-dash (a longer mark than the dash, and inserted without spaces) is a perfectly acceptable way to vary punctuation. When the em-dash is unavailable (as it is here on this forum), the usual practice is to put in two dashes, again without spaces--like this. In addition, nowadays it is only dusty academics ( ) who put two spaces after the final punctuation of a sentence. The two-spaces rule dates from the days of monospaced fonts, when it helped visually mark the end of a sentence. With today's proportional fonts, it's no longer necessary. All professionally published material nowadays has only one space after final punctuation. As one grammar and punctuation geek to another, I salute you!

So the answer to your question could have simply been "yes"?

Damn, I was there! I remember that 52nd St. thing. I recall seeing Roy Haynes and the Hip Ensemble, and a big band that would have been Sam Rivers. Later in the day Haynes could be seen on a bench with a woman friend, the two of them sharing a huge spliff. As for the drummer in photo #1, doesn't it look like this gentleman? I would have thought our own clifford_thornton would have caught this!

"Astral Black Simulations" sounds like a Steve Coleman title! But "Techno Voodu" gives me a very bad feeling. I think I'll sit this one out.

Surely both could be true?

I'm not Dylan-obsessive but I do like him a lot. With some apprehension, I'm going to go see him in concert in April--boots I've heard of Dylan over the past couple of years reveal that his voice is now a painful wreck, although his artful phrasing will probably make up for it. Does anyone know who the opening act will be? He generally picks 'em well. A decade or two ago I saw him with Van Morrison as the opener; recently he had Merle Haggard.

Many happy returns!

She was only a maroon with respect to not doing what her friends expected of her. The random number she went for had just as much chance of winning as the number they had been using. And since the chances of either one of those numbers winning was infinitesimal... I wonder if that group will continue playing the lottery, and if they'll keep using the same number.

People who write well are relatively rare, but it's not often that something this bad is published for public consumption. Lindsay Lohan's publicist, or whoever looks after her, shouldn't have let this go out without correction. It's embarassing for her. She should join a message board. Frequent practice on message boards definitively improves people's writing!

Well, I guess I won't be chucking out my iPod any time soon.

That machinadynamica site is clearly a fraudulent operation out to catch gullible faux-audiophiles. Check out this paragraph for their "Clever Little Clock" product: The Clever Little Clock is a small, battery-powered alarm clock that has been extensively modified using a number of highly-specialized techniques. The Clever Little Clock does not plug into the wall and has no direct or indirect influence on the audio signal per se -- not on house wiring, audio components, cables, interconnects, power cords or acoustic waves. Yet the Clock has a pronounced affect on the sound produced by all digital and analog playback systems. In addition, all video systems/formats in the house will be improved by placing one or two clocks in the listening room; the video picture will be clearer, with better contrast and color saturation -- TV, cable TV, DVD, etc. And yet they apparently are happy to take your PayPal payments. Amazing!

I'm trying to remember high school...

Yeah, I love Firefox. I was perfectly happy with IE but someone insisted I give Firefox a try. It was tabbed browsing that got me hooked. Not all sites work well with Firefox, but you can designate specific sites to open in IE-compatible tabs, so that took care of that problem. Also there are loads of add-ins that are useful and/or fun.

A friend of ours who's a great cook invites anywhere from 10 to 20 guests to her place every year for a Thanksgiving weekend. Being in France we obviously don't get Thanksgiving as a holiday, so she does it the weekend before or after. So it's Nov. 25-26 for us. She does turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, green beans and bacon, various other side dishes, and sweet potato pie, all washed down usually with an abundance of excellent burgundy. Guests bring whatever strikes their fancy. Saturday night is the main pig-out, then a hard core stays over and we brunch on Sunday on leftovers and whatever else she whips up until we can take no more. The turkey, incidentally, she buys fresh (one or two of them) from a local farmer, generally killed within the last 24 hours. Frozen turkeys are simply not available anywhere here, and I don't regret it.

Betty Carter once said (paraphrasing), "When Rufus Harley came out, he was playing downtown and everybody went down to see him, myself, all the cats. He was playing OK but before long we realized his bagpipes were in the key of G. Every tune he played was in G!"

I can't say I ever figured out what to do with my life, but I ended up doing it anyway. When I moved to France as a young man I had no saleable skills other than the fact that I could speak English and French and knew how to touch-type. I took a job as a typist for a translation agency, then moved up to proofreading translations, then went into business as a freelance translator, then took a technical writing course and found a job as a technical writer, then became an editor of technical writers. Meanwhile the better part of three decades went by and now I'm 48! How did it all happen so fast?

You're right, she has such a non-descript look that it's difficult. But I figured since she was sitting with Swallow it had to be her.

Forgot to mention seeing Steve Swallow, Carla Bley and Andy Sheppard in a restaurant in Paris. But the real question is: how many times have we been recognized by jazz musicians on the street?

George Coleman on the street in NYC; Michel Petrucciani on a bridge in Paris; Steve Lacy on the street in Paris more than once, and once at a party given by a friend who happened to have once been a neighbor of Lacy's--chatted with him for a little while, he was very sociable; Archie Shepp in a Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées (looking through his own records!); Mark Helias on the subway in NYC; David Murray on a TGV platform in Paris; Al Levitt in a record store in Paris; and too many to name in the audience at jazz clubs.