Chrome

Marlon Brando Marlin Perkins Abe Vigoda

Thanks! Coincidentally, that probably also explains why I didn't get it ...

Some of those have really stumped me ... what's the link between Brandi Chastain and Ry Cooder?

Lizzie Borden Elsie the Cow someone else

Coltrane piano might jazz up High Point museum The Associated Press HIGH POINT -- The High Point Museum is asking residents to help buy a piano owned and played by jazz legend John Coltrane, who spent his youth in High Point. The museum is looking for 88 contributors to purchase each of the piano's keys for $162.50 to raise the $14,300 needed to bring the piano home. The piano would be displayed in the museum with other Coltrane memorabilia. "When someone of that caliber, who should be a household name in jazz, having something like that coming back to the community is very exciting," said Wally West, musical director of the John Coltrane Jazz Workshop, a weeklong music camp the High Point Area Arts Council created about three years ago. "This will put High Point on the map much more than for just its furniture." The piano was originally sold to another bidder for $10,000 at an auction in February, said Chuck Alt, chairman of the High Point Museum and Historical Society board of directors. That deal fell through, and the museum was offered the chance to buy the piano at the same price, he said. The museum also needs $1,800 for the buyer's premium, $1,500 for shipping and $1,000 to redesign a space in the museum. The piano once sat in Coltrane's family home in High Point. The piano left High Point for Philadelphia when Coltrane's jazz career took off. Coltrane's cousin, Mary Alexander, who lived with the jazz musician for a time in Philadelphia, sent the piano to the auction house. Coltrane died in 1967. Museum officials say they hope to raise the money needed to purchase the piano by May 16. If they can't raise enough money through contributions, museum officials plan to borrow from reserves to buy it. "The [museum] board is committed to making it happen," Taylor said. "We're sitting on money raised for collections. We don't spend the money lightly, but we thought we might not be able to purchase some of the items belonging to Coltrane again." Coltrane grew up in High Point and got his musical start at the William Penn High School. A jazz saxophonist in the late '40s, '50s and '60s, he fathered some of the most innovative styles and techniques in jazz music. When Coltrane left the community, much of his early history went with him. A sign along Centennial Street in High Point claims the furniture city as Coltrane's hometown and is one of the few public tributes to Coltrane's ties to the area. "We have so very few items belonging to John Coltrane in High Point," said Barbara Taylor, director of the High Point Museum. "This may be one of the most significant items we can purchase to represent Coltrane's life in High Point." Two months ago, the museum spent $19,558 to buy three pieces of John Coltrane history: a fifth-grade report written by Coltrane; three pieces of sheet music with composition notes from the musician; and a 1961 award from the magazine Down Beat.

The Doobie Brothers Mary Jane Watson Kirsten Dunst

My daughters love the show, so its usually on even if I'm not paying all that much attention to it ... however, I did happen to catch Bo doing Freebird!

Stanley Turrentine + the Three Sounds: Blue Hour Various Chet Baker stuff (my wife isn't a huge jazz fan, but she's got a thing for ol' Chet) I've also got this multi disc import collection of Lester Young/Billie Holiday stuff ... one of the first times my wife and I, uh, you know, I had some Billie Holiday on.

Edit for source: Men's Health Web site Is Your Town Down? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Which towns stand in the face of depression By: Sara Vigneri Maybe it was all those years of futility for the Phillies. Or the shadows cast by New York City to the north and Washington, D.C., to the south. Whatever the reasons, Philadelphia has earned the melancholy distinction of being America's most depressed city, followed closely by Detroit and St. Petersburg, Florida. Men's Health compiled this list based on antidepressant sales, courtesy of NDC Health; suicide rates, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and the number of days inhabitants reported being depressed, based on the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, accessed through bestplaces.net. Where can you find happiness? Texas, that's where. Three of its cities placed in the top four: number one, Laredo; number two, El Paso; and number four, Corpus Christi. The 20 Happiest Cities 1. Laredo, TX: A+ 2. El Paso, TX: A+ 3. Jersey City, NJ: A+ 4. Corpus Christi, TX: A+ 5. Baton Rouge, LA: A 6. Honolulu, HI: A- 7. Fresno, CA: A- 8. San Jose, CA: A- 9. Lincoln, NE: B+ 10. Bakersfield, CA: B+ 11. Buffalo, NY: B+ 12. Anchorage, AK: B+ 13. Stockton, CA: B+ 14. Shreveport, LA: B+ 15. (3-way tie) Madison, WI: B, Montgomery, AL: B, and Des Moines, IA: B 18. Wichita, KS: B 19. (tie) Sacramento, CA: B and Omaha, NE: B The 20 Most Depressed Cities 1. Philadelphia, PA: F 2. Detroit, MI: F 3. St. Petersburg, FL: F 4. St. Louis, MO: F 5. Tampa, FL: F 6. Indianapolis, IN: F 7. (3-way tie) Mesa, AZ: F, Phoenix, AZ: F, and Scottsdale, AZ: F 10. Cleveland, OH: F 11. New York, NY: D- 12. Salt Lake City, UT: D- 13. Atlanta, GA: D 14. (3-way tie) Yonkers, NY: D, Pittsburgh, PA: D, and Kansas City, MO: D 17. (3-way tie) Long Beach, CA: D, Los Angeles, CA: D, Nashville, TN" D 20. Portland, OR: D

World B. Free! Coincidentally, I was just thinking about him the other day and Googled him ... this is from the 76ers Web site. 76ers Ambassador of Basketball World B. Free The Ambassador of 76ers Basketball, World B. Free continues to score big in the communities of Philadelphia and the surrounding Delaware Valley. Entering his fifth season with Sixers, Free travels to schools, recreation centers and playgrounds in the tri-state area teaching the fundamentals of basketball and life. Through his constant effort to enlighten and enrich the minds of the youth in the community, World B. Free has become a household name yet again as the ambassador of 76ers basketball. This comes from his work not on the court but his work off the court. In particular Free uses the Philadelphia 76ers Summer Hoops Tour to get his message across. Thousands of children each summer gather to be in the presence of Free as he challenges these young people to not only further their basketball skills but their life skills. ------------------------------------------------------ We now we return to your regularly scheduled programming: Martha Plimpton George Plimpton Sidd Finch

Anyone pick this up yet? Sound very interesting ... 'With Billie': The Lady Sang Jazz Ballads By JOHN LELAND Published: April 24, 2005 N April 1959, three months before her death at the age of 44, Billie Holiday complained about having to compete with her lurid public image. ''Every time I do a show I'm up against everything that's ever been written about me,'' she told an interviewer. ''I have to fight the whole scene to get people to listen to their own ears and believe in me again.'' Nearly half a century later, Holiday remains swaddled in myths and misconceptions, many of them of her own devising. Among friends she invented stories, and her quickie autobiography, ''Lady Sings the Blues,'' written with William Dufty, began its fabrications with its famous first lines: ''Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16 and I was 3.'' (As Robert O'Meally has pointed out, public records show that Billie's mother was 19 when she gave birth, and the couple never married.) And for the record, the lady mostly sang jazz ballads, not blues. The challenge for Holiday's biographers has been to extricate her not just from these myths but from the woman we think we know: the suffering black woman, beaten by a hard life and no-good men, drinking and drugging her way to oblivion. Especially in her later years, Holiday traded on her public image, singing in a voice that stood as proof of her bruises. For the most part, her audiences didn't know the difference. As one of her producers remarks in Julia Blackburn's new biography, ''With Billie,'' her audience ''didn't give a damn what her voice was like because she was Billie Holiday, with a style and a sound like no other woman ever had anywhere, and what she once was would carry her through.'' Along the way, Holiday left contradictory impressions on the people who traveled with her: the reform-school classmates, pimps, musicians, lovers, narcs, abusers, enablers and hangers-on, who nourished their own stories of her life and their roles in it. ''With Billie'' compiles some of these stories, using interviews conducted in the 1970's by a researcher named Linda Kuehl, who committed suicide before she could finish her own book. Blackburn promises less a unifying biography than ''a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn't matter if the stories don't fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman.'' The results feel like table scraps snatched from a particularly rich table. Blackburn's approach doesn't bring Holiday into particularly new focus, nor, since we rarely hear Holiday's voice, does it bring us inside her psychological fortress. Blackburn doesn't have a theory. What she has is a method, an appreciation for loose ends -- ''order has never been one of my strong points'' -- and boxes full of tapes and transcripts. The interviews circle around questions that divided Holiday's associates. Was she a masochist? Was she crazy? How deep was her addiction? What did she want? Blackburn pursues only what Kuehl asked and prints only the answers she received. The subjects alternately describe a maternal Holiday who wanted children and a sexually casual one who entertained guests naked backstage, her pubic hair dyed red. From childhood, Holiday sought violent men and goaded them to escalating levels of abuse. The pianist Carl Drinkard describes her third husband, Louis McKay, as ''the real true man she always dreamed of,'' who would ''knock her unconscious with a single blow of his fist.'' This tells us as much about Drinkard as Holiday. Blackburn nicely evokes the players around Holiday. Some flirt with Linda Kuehl; some wax nostalgic; many have since followed Kuehl and Holiday to the grave. Their often self-serving stories are fascinating for their ordinariness. We meet Bobby Tucker, the pianist who fetched Holiday after she was imprisoned for drug possession, and learn offhand that his light-skinned father turned down a chance of ''becoming a white man''; we meet Jimmy Fletcher, a narc assigned to jazz musicians because of his race, who laments that ''when you form some sort of friendship with anybody, it's not pleasant to get involved with criminal activities against that person.'' The most striking speaker, McKay, who is described variously as a stabilizing force, a pimp and a drug supplier, is captured in a profane telephone conversation with Maely Dufty, the wife of William Dufty. In the transcript, McKay talks about Holiday as if she were a prostitute not earning money for her pimp and promises violence in return: ''Ain't going to let nobody make a fool out of me, good as I've been to this woman.'' Biography, like fiction, aims to liberate its protagonists from such characters, to create autonomous subjects rather than objects. Holiday has so far resisted this treatment. For literary purposes she remains, as Farah Jasmine Griffin has written, a tragic figure without much personal or artistic intent, someone who ''feels but does not think.'' Blackburn, who has written two novels, does present one fully autonomous character -- herself, extrapolating scenes from photographs or interview transcripts. After the lawyer Earle Zaidins talks about encountering Holiday, dressed in a mink coat as she walks her dog, Blackburn muses, ''Perhaps she muttered in her dark and rasping voice'' that a dog ''was more faithful than any of the goddamn men she had come across.'' Or perhaps she just commented on the weather. This is a difference between biography and documentary. The former seeks to strip away myth; in the latter, it's often enough to reconstruct it. Both have incomplete truths to tell, so it's important to know what you're getting. And with documentary, you may want a soundtrack to fill in the gaps. John Leland is a reporter at The Times and the author of ''Hip: The History.''

The Triplets of Belleville Davis Love III Clarence Williams III

LaVern Baker Buddy Baker Bake McBride

Sharon Stone Jerry Mathers Cotton Mather

The Hulk Sgt. Hulka The Wild Bunch

Mr. Whipple Dick Wilson Flip Wilson

Okay, I have vague memories of this guy as a "blues" guitarist ... his thing is that he's blind and plays sitting down, etc., but I also just saw something on Google news about a jazz album he's put out. Has anybody heard this or heard of it? My recollection is that Healey could really jam, but was usually kinda whitebread ...

Sallie Mae Sally Field Kevin Costner

Professor Longhair Russell Johnson Randy Johnson

I recently picked up "Great Divide" and Freeman's playing really caught my ear ... kind of Lovano-esque, but edgier. Can anyone else recommend some of other CDs?

King Crimson Paul Bryant Dan Haggerty

Guy Lombardo Guy LaFleur Pete Rose

I didn't really start getting into music until I was 9 or 10, when I got a transistor radio for my birthday and started listening to a local R&B station ... Spinners, Gladys Knight, etc., this was very early 1970s ... then, when I was 12, I saw the movie "Tommy," and that was certainly a musical memory I'll never forget!

L'il Abner L'il Bow Wow Annabella Lewin

Fantastic book ... the whole "New York trilogy" thing was great, but he's really lost me with his last books.