A couple of weeks ago, the Italian plum tree in our little orchard broke off at the base of its trunk and fell over, loaded with hundreds of perfect purple plums. Before the hired man chopped it up and hauled it away to a useful end in someone's fireplace, I harvested the tree's final crop and stashed it in bushel baskets. This evening, I pulled a chair up to the dissecting table in the garden shed, switched on the radio and set to work cutting the plums, removing the pits and putting the halves … [Read more...]

One of my favorite quotations about writing could apply just as well to jazz soloing. No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure. --Phillip Caputo … [Read more...]