The Rifftides staff received the following e-mail message from Portugal: I'd visit your blog. I hope you visit my blog: http://www.jazzseen.blogspot.com./. If you don't understand Portuguese, don't worry, you can listen jazz. Luiz Portuguese and Spanish are similar enough that I was able to make out … [Read more...]

One of the new Tulane University students reading Tom Sancton's Song For My Fathers sent this comment about the book and the Rifftides report on it: As an entering freshman at Tulane, I can only give the highest praise for Sancton's book. My first visit to New Orleans, in March of 2004, is forever … [Read more...]

Slow Drag Dead hallelulia four black Cadillac high black hearse and all the people come to hear the trom bone bawl look at Slow Drag picture on the Wall He call again Sweet Emma come Big Jim come when He call then honkie play and honkie plunk in Preservation Hall --Miller Williams, "Alcide … [Read more...]

The Bix Beiderbecke Festival opens today in Beiderbecke's home town, Davenport, Iowa. It features Randy Sandke and, in a nice stroke of timing, so does The Wall Street Journal. My piece called "The Best Trumpeter You Never Heard Of" is in the Journal's Leisure and Arts section. Here are samples: The … [Read more...]

It turns out that many listeners are concerned with the issues covered in our Means of Delivery discussion. Here are comments from three Rifftides readers. Like you, I'm pondering today's post re: means of delivery. We really must adjust to new realities, but I'm having a hard time believing that I … [Read more...]

Yesterday's post … [Read more...]

Mention of Chubby Jackson's album Chubby's Back as a digital download brought this account of the session that produced it. Doug: I was at the session in 1957 when this album was recorded. I was editor of Down Beat at the time, and a close friend of Chubby's, and I had been asked to write the liner … [Read more...]

Rifftides Reader Marc Myers writes from New York City: Some jazz tidbits... 1. Desmond's Bridge Over Troubled Water is an iTunes download for $9.90. This is an absolute gem (thanks so much for turning me onto it). Wow. 2. The rare and expensive import, Chubby's Back (Chubby Jackson, about whom not … [Read more...]

Each summer, Tulane University in New Orleans sends the coming autumn's entering students a book to read. Tulane's goal in its reading project is "to provide new students with a shared intellectual experience through the reading and discussion of a common book and a campus-wide intellectual dialogue … [Read more...]

Il Bello Del Jazz The Italian pianist Roberto Magris, who operates a band called Europlane, is out with a new CD featuring a distinguished guest. In his mid-forties, Magris is one of those European artists so steeped in jazz that in a blindfold test a listener--no matter how perceptive--would be … [Read more...]

Malachi Thompson, the sparkling, exploratory, Chicago jazz trumpeter who died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of fifty-six, recorded a flurry of CDs in his last decade. Many of Thompson's albums for his hometown label Delmark pulled off the demanding trick of looking simultaneously forward and … [Read more...]

Thank you so much for the great service you did for all serious jazz lovers regarding Concord's discontinuing so many important titles. This is infuriating and exasperating news. Key titles by Miles, Trane, and so many others will soon be axed. It's disgusting. I was already p____d off when they … [Read more...]

It was over in three seconds. I had broken out my moderately refurbished road bike early in the morning and taken it for its first real ride in a couple of years, a break from my recent steady routine of mountain biking. Along the trail near where the Naches River flows into the Yakima, I came up … [Read more...]

Recordings are a commodity. Companies sell them to make money. When a CD stops selling briskly, only a label willing to make money slowly over a period of years, or one that feels a cultural obligation, keeps it in the catalog. For decades, the Fantasy complex of labels took the long view. Its … [Read more...]

In the final installment of … [Read more...]

Welcome to the final installment of messages from Rifftides readers sharing with all of us what you have been listening to. "·I enjoy reading your blog. The following is what have been listening to recently. Dave Holland Quintet, Prime Directive. I have been listening to this album for the last few … [Read more...]

Ah, well, over the weekend so many more of you responded to the request for your current listening choices that we can't wrap it up today after all. If you wish to understand the genesis of these listings, go here. But--I am sorry--it's too late to contribute. At some point, we have to get back to … [Read more...]

Here is the third report on the survey of what Rifftides readers are listening to these days. "·Today I have two CDs in my car player: A lovely duo recording by Randy Sandke and Dick Hyman, and a CD reissue of one of my favorite LPs, Boss of the Blues, with Joe Turner and a dynamite studio band … [Read more...]

Entries are still arriving in the worldwide Rifftides listeners' sweepstakes (no losers, no prizes). It is not too late to join. All civil responses will be published. Simply send an e-mail message telling us your current listening choice. Please include your name and where you live. Here is the … [Read more...]