Kevin Bresnahan

Probably true, particularly in the case of my grandfather. I never even knew he fought in WWI until his dementia took over and it started spilling out non-stop. Up until then, he was just my grampa. When I was a kid, me & my friends used to play a game we called "Army", where we all ran through the woods with plastic guns yelling " Bang" and "killing" each other. Back then, it was a bunch of boys having fun. I even had a fake BAR and whoever had that gun would go by "Kirby", named after the character in the TV show "Combat!". I cannot imagine that would ever happen today.

The few men I knew over the years who had seen live action, never really wanted to talk about it. One was my late father-in-law, who saw action in Korea. I remember asking him what it was like and he really didn't want to talk about it. I asked him if it was because he had to kill people and his response was, "I assume that I killed the people who stopped shooting at me after I shot back". Another was a guy I worked with when I was a teenager. He had been in the jungles of Vietnam & he was really messed up by it. He had all kinds of physical ticks, especially when there were loud noises. He stuttered when he swore, which made us all laugh but he said it started when his tent-mate blew himself up with a grenade right next to him. We never laughed at him again. I guess that might make me stutter too. The worst case of PTSD I knew personally was my grandfather. By the time he died at the age of 97, his waking moments all took place in a WWI foxhole, with his friends getting killed around him all the time. It was so sad to watch. That was one of the few deaths where "his suffering is finally over" really fit the situation.

The Police - Synchronicity "Mother" is still a terrible song but "Every Breath You Take" is a masterpiece.

I have ripped my whole CD library into Q0 VBR mp3 files which I have stored on multiple external hard drives for redundancy. No one is going to take this library away from me unless they somehow manage to erase all of these drives. I used to store one at work but now that I'm retired, I have to store one at my daughter's house. One of the cool things about doing this is that I attached one to a Rasspberry Pi mini-computer running Volumio so I can play anything in my library on my main music system using my laptop or cell phone. I don't use the cell much as it's slow as heck accessing such a huge library. If an Apple computer allows an external drive for your music library, I would do the same thing there. I would never allow Microsoft or Apple to store my library, especially if they restricted my access. Your son should find out how to download his music back onto his PC and then back it up to an external hard drive.

I played the baritone horn in my high school band and when I first got into Jazz, I was surprised to find that there were bari horn players on a few dates. I was talking about it on-line somewhere and I got into a little e-mail exchange with Zawadi about it. I wish I had those e-mails but they are long gone. Looking back, there are so many e-mail exchanges I wished I kept, but I always treated e-mails as a temporary things & deleted them after reading them to save drive space.

For some reason, I have never gottne into Dire Straits' live recordings. I used to own "Alchemy" but I think I spun it once or twice. I'd much rather hear one of their studio albums. I don't think I even own "Alchemy" anymore. I'd be interested in hearing this but it appears to only be available in an expensive box set.

I'm feeling pretty good now. My wife still has a nasty cough.Strangely enough, the Maine CDC still calls people who get diagnosed at a medical clinic and meet certain risk factors (I'm old! ) so I got all of the recommendations read to me over the phone. According to them, I can go out without a mask 10 days after my first positive test, which is tomorrow. Seems pretty quick but you hope they know what they're doing after all this time with Covid in our world. The first time me & my wife got Covid, she got Paxlovid. It did seem to help but she had to stop taking it because it was making her miserable with the constant taste of metal.

I seem to be over it after day 6, but this morning my wife tested positive and she's feeling pretty lousy already. Her only saving grace so far is that her symptoms don't include a throat that feels like it was slashed with razor blades. Apparently we didn't quarantine quickly enough.

I really wish I had done this. I've seen so many jazz greats over the years that I've forgotten more than I remember.

It's not making the news anymore, but Covid is still out there. And let me tell you, it still sucks. I had a lovely Memorial Day weekend... sore throat, fever, chills, body aches, coughing like crazy & a nose so stuffed up that I went through about 4 boxes of tissues. I am lucky if i got 4 hours of restful sleep over 5 nights. This was my second time with this & it was much worse than the first. Being up to date on my vaccine boosters didn't help much this time. Plus, they now consider me "high risk" because I've somehow become "senior".

I was not aware that Blue Note somewhat assigned these concept albums to Grant Green. Is this true?

I buy my coffee from Gold Star Coffee out of Toronto & like you, I prefer the less expensive Jamaican coffee from the foothills. I also like that this "Jamaican Estate Reserve" coffee is in the low acid line. As we've gotten older, my wife & I prefer these low acidity coffees. Less chance for acid reflux. They sell green beans too if you're into roasting your own.

3 coffees per day? Italy must have a different definition for not being a caffeine man.

Walton never let anyone measure his actual height & always had it listed as 6'11", supposedly so he couldn't be called a "7 foot freak" by anyone. I remember seeing him standing next to Artis Gilmore, who played with Walton during the Celtics 1987-88 season, and Walton was taller. Gilmore's official height was 7'2". It's pretty obvious in the team picture.

I find the coffee I press using my Aeropress is more consistent than my regular coffee maker. I heat the water, pour it in, stir for 10 seconds, fill it back up to the top and press quickly. If you don't do that last part - press quickly - you can get a more bitter flavor profile. My favorite coffee in the Aeropress is an Ethiopian Moca Sidama that I buy freshly roasted from a small coffee shop in Salem, NH called Coffee Coffee.

For a single cup, I always use my trusty Aeropress. Great cup of coffee without the grounds like you get from a French press. I reuse the paper filters and the coffee gets better & better with a well-used filter.

Bill Walton, one heck of a basketball player, has died after a prolonged cancer fight. He was 71. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/40229031/nba-champion-hall-famer-bill-walton-dies-71 While I vividly remember his playing years with the Celtics (when he was healthy) because I was a season ticket holder, his music taste was also newsworthy. He went to a lot of Grateful Dead concerts and notoriously brought several Celtics players backstage when the Dead played in Worcester. RIP Bill. Cancer sucks.

I bought a Tachnivorm Moccamaster several years ago and me & my wife love it. It makes a very nice cup of coffee and is easy to use & clean. Because of my experience with our previous coffee maker, a Bonavita BV1800, I ordered a spare glass carafe for my Moccamaster. That Bonavita was a great coffee maker but they went belly up and I couldn't get a replacement carafe.

I went with the gel solution because I've read that some liquid cleaners can break down the epoxy that is used to attach the stylus to the stylus tube. I have two Ortofon 2M Black cartridges and Ortofon specifically says to avoid cleaning the stylus with fluids. That being said, I don't know that the Audio Technica fluid is one of those fluid cleaners that does that.

I bought one of these: DS-Audio ST-50 Microdust Cleaning Gel. It seems to do the trick. Some have complained that their stylus stuck in it, but I only momentarily drop it into the gel & I've not had any problems.

I have on the few occasions but it was many years ago. One time was when I was part of a round robin of reviewers of a Joe Manieri CD, "Coming Down The Mountain", which I hated doing because it was not a good review and I knew a lot of others really liked it. FWIW, Joe Christmas re-posted it here back in 2003.

Not true. The worst jazz organ use I ever saw live was when Jimmy Smith pulled out a stop and left the stage, expecting Phil Upchurch to try and solo around it. It was terrible. Jimmy was laughing when he came back on stage to push the stop back in. He knew it sucked.

I don't know how many times we have to go over this... there's no way a few misread 1's & 0's in a digital bitstream is going to change the frequency response of any playback. Misread digital data that the error correction cannot correct will result in noise like clicking or blanking, not any sort of modified output signal. The chain of 1's & 0's to create just a few seconds of music is astronomically huge and to change those few seconds of audio would require 10's of thousands of those 1's & 0's getting flipped... and that's only if the aren't corrected by error correction system. The CD standard is 44,100 digital samples per second. Think about that and imagine how many those 44,100 bits would have to change in just the exact way to make that single second of music go from a 5 kHz sound to a 7 kHz sound. Not going to happen. People need to stop attributing analog signal analysis to digital.

Green gets "stuck" on other albums but not as much as he does on "Green Street". No matter if it's intentional or not, it's not enjoyable to me & that's all that matters when I pick up something to listen to, no matter what the Jazz police i.e. JSngry, have to say. Green was a known drug user so you have to wonder if he was a little more "mellow" for this session than he was on others.

Someone sent me a needle-drop of this LP. I'm digging it. The tune "Lolita" is my least favorite. It seem off from the rest of the tunes... not very bluesy. Also, it's too bad the recording engineer felt the need to add reverb to Edwards' sax. I wonder if there are tapes without it? The title track has some uncredited piano playing. If this is Jimmy, I'm glad he stuck to organ.