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Category: Music

Life’s Soundtracks – King King and Dave Gunning

King King’s Blues and Dave Gunning’s Folk Provide the Soundtracks for  my  Commute to Paulsboro

It seems that lately a good portion of the music I listened to is heard on my commutes to Paulsboro to babysit Oliver. Now as best as I can remember Wednesday soundtracks were a blues album Reaching for the Light from the Scottish blues band King King and the afternoon on the afternoon trip a folk album from Canadian folksinger Dave Gunning. The album was Lift  his 11th album.

I first listen to King King in 2014 when they released the album Standing in the Shadows. It was a great album and at the 2014 British Blues Awards the band won five awards including the awards for ‘Best Album’ and ‘Best Band” read more

Groovin’ at the Crosse Roads on a Four Mile Run…..

The Run – Creek Out and Back – Modified – 4.03 miles

So today I ran for the first time in almost two weeks!! Two reasons, one a nagging cold that has been mostly nasal congestion and the other a very busy two weeks! Anyway, I worked today an easy Black Friday at Target. Nobody is buying food on Black Friday!! This afternoon I came home had leftovers from yesterday’s dinner and then took a nap! When I woke up I didn’t really feel like running, but the temperature was in the 60s and there was still about an hour of daylight so I decided to go for it! I thought about running a course with a hill but then I thought better about it and figured I needed a positive run, not a struggling run so I decided on the old Creek Out and Back! read more

Buy My Soul Back – Kevin Selfe

Great Soundtrack to a New Workout Type…..

Kevin Selfe – Buy My Soul Back  *****

The Workout….

So Sunday after sitting through that miserable Eagles loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs, I just couldn’t make myself lace up my new running shoes and go for a run! What I did instead was pull out the stationary bike and did a 30 minute interval workout. I really didn’t know how to lay out the workout – so I ended up alternating 1 minute of fast riding followed by 1 or 2 minutes of relatively slow riding. The result that I was able to get and keep my heart rate up to the 130s during the high intensity riding and then having it drop back down in the recovery portion. read more

Sonny Terry – Blues Harp Master!!

Sonny Terry – Blues Harp – Born October 24, 1911 Greensboro, Georgia

Among the many instruments that I love is the harmonica or more specifically the blues harp, and there are few who play that instrument better than Sonny Terry from Blues Harp…..

The joyous whoop that Sonny Terry naturally emitted between raucous harp blasts was as distinctive a signature sound as can possibly be imagined. Only a handful of blues harmonicists wielded as much of a lasting influence on the genre as did the sightless Terry (Buster Brown, for one, copied the whoop and all), who recorded some fine urban blues as a bandleader in addition to serving as guitarist Brownie McGhee‘s longtime duet partner.(From Blues Harp) read more

B.B. King – Blues Icon – Born September 16, 1925

B.B. King – Blues -Born near the town of Itta Bena, Mississippi
(September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015)

Back in May of this year the music world lost the legendary blues boy Riley B.B. King at the age of 89. Today September 16th, B B King would have turned 90! An autopsy performed on the musician, because two of his daughters alleged that he had been poisoned, revealed that King had died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease and congestive heart failure, with no evidence of poisoning. The following was posted last year at Me, Myself, Music and Mysteries…..

So today is the 88th birthday of probably the greatest blues musician of all time and certainly the one whose been at the top of his craft the longest, B.B. King!! First, here’s  the obligatory background information from Wikipedia, like he needs and introduction: read more

Cal Tjader – Latin Vibes from California!

Cal Tjader – Vibraphone – (July 16, 1925 – May 5, 1982)

Cal Tjader was born on July 16th in 1925 in Saint Louis, Missouri and that fact surprises me! See I thought that Tjader was Latin! I discovered Tjader’s music, because he plays vibraphone and Gary Burton’s album For Hamp. Bags, Red and Cal, led me to it! As “I listened to his Latin influenced music I just assumed that he was Latin. But in fact he is the son of touring Swedish American vaudevillians! His father tap danced and his mother played piano, a husband-wife team going from city to city with their troupe to earn a living.His father taught him to tap dance. He performed around the Bay Area as “Tjader Junior,” a tap-dancing wunderkind. He performed a brief non-speaking role dancing alongside Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the film The White of the Dark Cloud of Joy! read more

Aaron Diehl – Space Time Continuum

Aaron Diehl Joins Generations on Space Time Continuum

Aaron DiehlWhen I first started to listen to jazz it was mostly the guitar of Wes Montgomery and the Hammond B3 of Jimmy Smith, but through the years I started adding other artists. Pianist like Thelonious Monk and Oscar Peterson were added to my music library, along with Miles, Gary Burton and Milt Jackson. One night a few years ago I put on The Bespoke Man’s Narrative from Aaron Diehl, while I was reading. After a few minutes I stopped reading and listened to some unbelievable piano! Along with Diehl’s piano on that album I also loved the vibraphone of Warren Wolf on the album. Anyway, a few weeks ago Diehl’s new album Space,Time, Continuum joined my music rotation and it’s another outstanding outing from a great pianist. What surprised me was the presence of some fine saxophone and trumpet, which I hadn’t heard on Diehl’s previous albums. read more

Hank Mobley….exploring his music

Hank Mobley – Tenor Saxophone – Composer 

 (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986)

I first discovered the saxophone of Hank Mobley one night in 2014 when I was exploring some jazz. That night I explored the music of Blue Mitchell, Wynton Kelly and Hank Mobley. One that night Hank Mobley’s album Soul Station was my favorite of the night!! You can read about it in- A Jazzy Night with Music from Blue, Wynton and Hank and friends!! Here’s some background information about Hank Mobley from Wikipedia:

Henry “Hank” Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is “one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era.” read more

Colin Edwin – Explorations of his Music!

Colin Edwin –  fretted and fretless bass guitar , double bass and guimbri. –Born July 2, 1970

Ihave explored the music of Colin Edwin, not through the band that he has been a member of since 1993 Porcupine Tree; but through his collaborations with Jon Durant and more recently with Armonite. So today July 2nd i thought it may be a good day to more extensively explore the man and his music.  What I discovered is that Colin Edwin, like many talented musicians has many different outlets for his musicianship! In addition to his work with Porcupine Tree, Edwin has released solo albums. collaborated many artists and been a member of several bands! Some basics from Wikipedia. read more

Terence Blanchard – Breathless

Terence Blanchard

Terence Blanchard’s – Breathless – leaves me just that way!

One of the  albums that has spent considerable time in my music rotation over the last few weeks is Breathless the latest release from Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective. Terence Blanchard’s music career started in the 1980s first touring with Lionel Hampton and then replacing Wynton Marsalis in Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers. Since then he has been a prominent force in the jazz community.with 5 career Grammys out of his 13 career Grammy nominations, Terence has released twenty albums since his debut in 1984. Blanchard has probably reached his widest audience through his work as a film composer. His trumpet can be heard on nearly fifty film scores; with more than forty of the films scores were composed by Blanchard. As if all that was not enough to do, since 2000, Blanchard has served as Artistic Director at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.and in August of 2011, he was named the Artistic Director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami Frost School of Music! Some people can do it all!. read more