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This is the 92nd anniversary of Dizzy Gillespie’s birth. There are many ways to celebrate it. The Rifftides staff offers two. The first video is from the Bern Jazz Festival in 1985. The band is Dizzy, James Moody, Gene Harris, Ray Brown and Grady Tate. The tune is “Ow.” It was made famous by the great Gillespie big band of the 1940s. So were Moody and Brown.
The second clip is from the 1979 Newport Jazz Festival in Nice, France. With Gillespie are Arnie Lawrence, alto sax; Stan Getz, tenor sax; John Lewis, piano; George Duvivier, bass; and Shelly Manne, drums. The piece is Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing.”

Jazz On The Tube has strung together nearly a score of Gillespie videos, including his only known TV appearance with Louis Armstrong and his gig with The Muppets. Happy Dizzy’s birthday to you.

Let’s wrap up the Fall Festival at The Seasons. Here are brief reports about the final four events.
• Africa: The Power of Drum and Dance: Michael Wimberly, a percussionist and composer from New York, performed with scores of sidemen and sidewomen. They were professional drummers, dancers and singers from his troupe; students from several middle schools and high schools; a contingent from the Yakima Valley Community College jazz ensemble; and a band of marimbists, if that’s the term, who played marimbas of all sizes from small to preposterously large. Building on traditional African rhythms, Wimberly morphed his flexible supporting cast into several percussion and dance combinations delivering aural and visual excitement that had the audience in a packed house grooving in their seats. It was a spectacle that had the added impact of opening up a hundred or so youngsters to roots music that can enrich their lives. The joy on their faces seemed to show that the process was underway.
• The Matt Wilson Quartet. Wilson alone can be a spectacle. Fresh from the cover of Down Beat magazine, the drummer brought to the festival saxophonist Jeff Lederer, trumpeter Kirk Knuffke and bassist Chris Lightcap. Six of their ten pieces were from his most recent CD, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark. Their intensity was enhanced by the energy Wilson generates in live performance and transmits to musicians and audience. He kicked off a furious tempo for John Lewis’s “Two Bass Hit,” a staple of Dizzy Gillespie’s 1940s big band. Lederer soloed with essence of Coltrane, Knuffke with impressive thematic development, Lightcap with lyricism, the true wood sound of the bass and (hooray) little volume on his amplifier. Through the evening, Wilson surged, roared and crackled beneath the ensemble and the soloists, a continuously renewable source of power. Other highlights of the set: Lederer coming out of an abstracted arrangement of “Don’t Blame Me” into a gorgeous tenor saxophone solo on the tune’s changes, then a pure statement of the melody; his wild clarinet solo on “Rear Control;” Knuffke’s ability to produce a sound like Chet Baker’s one minute and Wadada Leo Smith’s the next; The contrast between Wilson’s manic shenanigans in a spoof of heavy metal called “Schoolboy Thug” and the peacefulness of the encore, a prayerful ensemble reading of the Scottish Presbyterian hymn “Come and Find the Quiet Center.”
• Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra. In addition to percussionist Wimberly’s work with young musicians, the primary educational activity of The Seasons Fall Festival was the development of emerging composers and conductors from all regions of the United States. The composers studied under the guidance of Daron Hagen, Chris Brubeck, Gilda Lyons and Robert Frankenberry. The emerging conductors worked with retiring Yakima Symphony Orchestra conductor Brooke Cresswell (pictured) and one of Cresswell’s mentors, Donald Thulean, a veteran conductor of several orchestras. The evening began with the world premiere of Cicadas, Lyons’ atmospheric evocation of a childhood memory of seventeen-year cicadas swarming. It ended with Hagen’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra, featuring violinist Simon James and cellist Kevin Krentz. In between, the audience heard the culmination of a week of workshops and rehearsals. Each young conductor led the orchestra in a piece by one of the young composers. The seven new compositions ran about four minutes apeice. They showed enormous potential from a group of musicians, one only 16 years old, whose work should give heart to anyone concerned about the future of serious music in America.
• Dena DeRose. On the eve of her return to Graz, Austria, where she is a professor at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts, the pianist and singer demonstrated her qualifications in both areas. Her playing and singing are musical in the extreme and, when she digs into the rhythm with the zeal she displayed Saturday night, dramatic. Matt Wilson and Chris Lightcap joined DeRose for the festival’s final concert, creating a trio with extraordinary cohesion and singleness of purpose. There were moments when the three were swinging as hard as any piano trio I have heard. The interaction between Wilson and the pianist was remarkable. DeRose’s celebrated improvisation of lines with voice and keyboard in parallel was never a gimmick, the integration so subtle that it took the listener a few seconds to realize what was producing that unique blend of sound. The technique has been used since at least as far back as the great Joe Mooney, but rarely with DeRose’s musicianship and finesse. Whether in a standard like “How Deep is the Ocean?” or the relatively unfamiliar ballad “In the Glow of the Moon,” DeRose’s singing was perfect in pitch, phrasing, interpretation and pleasure in performing. Most of The Seasons audience arrived with little or no previous knowledge of DeRose. They are unlikely to forget the finale that she provided a memorable festival.

There was a sneak peak of the–for lack of a more accomodating word–classical aspects of The Seasons Fall Festival when tenor Robert Frankenberry and soprano Gilda Lyons previewed a bit of Daron Hagen’s opera Amelia. The Seattle Opera will premiere the work next spring. At an intimate session in The Seasons back room, the New York composer talked about the opera, which is in gestation, then took to the piano to accompany Frankenberry and Lyons in an aria. The Amelia of the title is not the lost pilot Amelia Earhart but the daughter of a Navy flyer who died in the Viet Nam war. The libretto by the poet Gardner McFall is based on the wartime loss of her own father. The work, as described by Hagen, has a complexity of themes involving flight, including references to Earhart and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. If the entire opera is as beautiful as the sample, it will be worth the trip to Seattle in May.
Hagen, the festival’s artistic director, put together a sampler concert in the main hall that previewed many elements of the festival’s nine days. It encompassed performances by the Finisterra Piano Trio, the Kairos String Quartet, Chris Brubeck, the African percussion expert Michael Wimberly, more singing by Lyons and Frankenberry and a performance by Frankenberry of Aaron Copland’s 1931 Piano Variations. The Copland piece begins as a puzzling series of abstractions from his most experimental period. It works through 20 nervous, kinetic variations to a coda that ends the work in a grand statement packed with harmonic riches. It is notoriously demanding to play and, for many, difficult to listen to. Leonard Bernstein used to say that he could wind up a party with it because it would empty the room in two minutes. This recording is probably the best one available, but Rob Frankenberry should put it on a CD because–there’s no better way to describe it–he plays the hell out of it.
The “Bravi Tutti” sampler evening ended with a new Hagen arrangement of “Amazing Grace” played by all of the evening’s 20 or so musicians. Brooke Creswell, the retiring music director of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra, played double bass, Chris Brubeck worked up a long, blowsy, trombone solo and the Finisterra’s Tanya Stambuck brought down the house with her vigorous interpretation of the solo piano section.
The next evening’s chamber music concert by Kairos and Finisterra had riches of several eras. It included works by composers Michael Torke, Felix Mendelssohn, André Previn, BedÅ™ich Smetana and a deeply felt short string quartet piece by Hagen, Snapshot no. 1: Wedding Day. It ended with the Finisterra Trio’s world premiere performance of Gilda Lyons’ Folklorico, commissioned by The Seasons for this festival. The four-part piece is based on music and folklore of Nicaragua. It abounds with passions and rhythms of Latin America and a slow section called “Tortuga’s Lament” so intriguing that I am ready to immediately hear it again.
More later on an evening of cabaret, an African drum spectacular, the dynamo known as Matt Wilson and the Dena DeRose trio, which, as this is written, I am off to hear. Stay
tuned.

The next night (see the following exhibit) in their own concert, the Imani Winds drew upon music from their CD The Classical Underground. They began with the late Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango, a brief example of the heterodoxy with which Piazzolla shocked and outraged the Argentine tango establishment and ultimately endeared himself to music lovers everywhere. The Imani French horn player, Jeff Scott, arranged the piece to feature his instrument’s dramatic, even explosive, qualities. From a different branch of Latin music, the woodwind quintet continued with composer Paquito D’Rivera’s Aires Tropicales, a seven-part suite illuminated by the insinuating movement called “Dizzyness” (after D’Rivera’s former boss Dizzy Gillespie) and the magnetic harmonies of a joropo, “Vals Venezolano.”
To these ears, predisposed by years of living in New Orleans, the evening’s highlight was a short piece by another composer seasoned under the tutelage and leadership of Gillespie. It was Lalo Schifrin’s La Nouvelle Orleans, a seven-minute sketch that combines Schifrin’s classical and jazz sensibilities to encapsulate the sadness and liberating joy of a traditional New Orleans funeral procession. The Imanis, virtuosos all, captured both aspects as if they had often experienced the emotions of that march to and from the cemetery. Torin Spellman-Diaz, the oboist in the group photo above, was unable to be in Yakima. Her substitute, able and fully engaged, was James Roe (pictured), a stalwart of the New York chamber music milieu. To see bios and more photos of the regular members of the group, go here.
More about the festival is on the way, maybe later today.

The Portland Jazz Festival today announced its 2010 headliners and beefed up its front office strength by adding a veteran jazz publicist as managing director.
The headliners for the February 22-28 festival will be Pharoah Sanders (pictured), Luciana Souza, Dave Douglas, Dave Holland and the Mingus Big Band. There will also be concerts by three Norwegian groups. They are the saxophone-accordian duo of Trygvie Seim and Frode Haltli, the Christian Wallumrod Ensemble and In The Country, a trio of acoustic bass, piano and drums that, according to the festival’s publicity, combines rock influences with jazz. That’s not a revolutionary idea, but maybe they have a new slant.
Don Lucoff, who has for more than two decades run the extensive publicity agency DL Media, will take over as the festival’s managing director, working with its founder and artistic director, Bill Royston. For details about the artists and Lucoff, see the PDX web site.
Speaking of festivals, I’m moving at a fast pace battling car trouble and trying to keep up with The Seasons Fall Festival, now in its sixth day. I promised reports, and they will come, possibly beginning as soon as late tonight. The variety and quality have been impressive.

Speaking of Dena DeRose (see the October 9 item below), she just showed up in YouTube clips accompanying and soloing with Bill Henderson at this summer’s Litchfield Jazz Festival. Listen to the head of steam the quartet generates on “You Are My Sunshine.” Avery Sharpe is the bassist, Winard Harper the drummer.

To hear three more songs from that occasion, go here and scroll down to the middle of the screen.

Sorry for the short notice, but this just came in from Jovino Santos Neto. The program he tells us about will go on the air ten minutes from now as I write this at 12:50 pm PDT.

Jim Wilke, who has become a Northwest musical icon for his relentless support of our music scene for decades. His show Jazz Northwest is a sampling of the music that happens around here, and “Jazz After Hours” keeps good company to all those who love music throughout the weekend nights. Jim is having a fund drive for his show today, Sunday from 1 to 2 PM at KPLU, 88.5 FM. I encourage you to call 1-800-677-5787 during that time or go online anytime at www.kplu.org and donate what you can to keep his show going. Make sure you specify Jim Wilke’s show as a recipient of your generosity. His show is the only one on the station that fully supports the world-class music that flows from this region to the world. Now it’s the time to us to give back.

To hear JIm’s program, go here. Please consider supporting this important music broadcaster. Here’s a link to his invaluable Jazz After Hours. But the important thing right now is to help assure the future of Jazz Northwest.

For the next several days, blogging will be irregular. (“So, what’s new?” a cynic might say.) The Rifftides staff is knee deep in the fourth year of The Seasons Fall Festival. The nine days of music include The Brubeck Brothers Quartet (pictured, left), Matt Wilson, Dena DeRose, The Imani Winds (pictured below), an African drum ensemble and an assortment of piano trios, string quartets and a chamber orchestra. The festival will present the world premiere of a new work by composer Daron Hagen, the festival’s artistic director. To see a schedule of the main events, go here.
Parallel to the festival’s main concerts is a series of workshops conducted by Hagen for a dozen outstanding young composers from around the United States. The Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra under Brooke Creswell will perform two new compositions chosen from among those by the young composers. All of that in a town of 85,000 in the heart of apple country at the foot of the Cascade mountains. That’s lot of music, a lot of listening. I will post reviews and impressions along the way. The satellite events will include a Monday pre-concert music-and-gab session conducted by your faithful correspondent. For a detailed schedule of all the events, go here. If you are coming to Yakima for the festival, please make yourself known. I’d enjoy meeting you.

A friend asked me to bicycle through the Yakima River canyon with him this morning. I said I had too much work to do, so he rode the 40 miles north to Ellensburg alone. When he got back, he sent a message, “The canyon is nice today,” with evidence.

Trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, admired within jazz circles but little known outside them, has received tangible recognition for his work as a player and a teacher. Belgrave left Ray Charles in the early 1960s ago to settle in Detroit. In today’s Detroit Free Press, Mark Stryker reports on the award and on Belgrave’s contribution to the city’s cultural life. Stryker writes:

For 46 years, Belgrave’s world-class musicianship, charisma, swing and commitment to mentoring young musicians — many of whom have become stars — have made Detroit a hipper city than it would have been without him.

To read the whole thing and hear a Belgrave performance with Tommy Flanagan’s trio, go here.
This video profile by Bret Primack supplements Stryker’s column.

For more of Primack’s profiles, go here.

Marc Myers, the resourceful and indefatigable king of the verbatim interview, posts a JazzWax conversation with Sonny Rollins about one of Rollins’s most unusual and successful albums. An excerpt:

JW: How did you pick the songs?

SR: All the songs I knew. By going to the movies so much as a child in the 30s, I was tuned in to Western popular music themes. Even today, people credit me for having an encyclopedic knowledge of what’s called the American Songbook. Included in there are Western songs, and Country music, too. When I was offered the date by Les (Koenig), I said, “Let’s make a concept album about the West,” which would evoke my feelings and the whole Western thing.

Rollins talks about how the famous William Claxton cover photo in the desert came about, and whose idea it was. To get the whole story, go here.

Brand New: In Brief
Joe Martin, Not By Chance (Anzic). Martin is a versatile and rounded bassist who has collaborated with a wide range of musicians at the heart of the 30-something generation of jazz players in New York. Here, he enlists two fellow members of that generation’s elite, pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist and clarinetist Chris Potter. The drummer, several years younger, is Marcus Gilmore, an accompanist who listens, reacts and adjusts. All of the tunes but Jaco Pastorius’s “The Balloon Song” are Martin’s. The compositions and the performers radiate assurance and peacefulness regardless of tempo or harmonic challenge, yet there’s not a hint of complacency. For all its loveliness, this is music that energizes the listener’s imagination.
E.J.Strickland, In This Day (Strick Musik). Like Marcus Gilmore, drummer Strickland is elastic in his approach to rhythm. In this album of his compositions, he drives the music while accommodating the idiosyncrasies and divergent approaches of his horn players, pianist and bassist. The sidemen are his twin brother Marcus, a resourceful tenor and soprano saxophonist; the increasingly impressive alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw; pianist Luis Perdomo; and bassist Hans Glawischnig. The latter two are regular members of alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon’s band. An assortment of guests is employed on various tracks for atmosphere and a couple of spoken-word episodes that are weak poetry. The quintet provides the primary interest, and it was all Strickland needed except for Pedro Martinez’s congas on the Latin pieces, Tia Fuller’s winsome flute on “Illusions” and a reflective guitar interlude by David Gilmore on “Robin.” The saxophones achieve a lovely blend on “Enternal,” managing to convey with their different pitches alone a sense of harmonization. “New Beginnings” is a particularly effective Strickland composition, with Strickland and Martinez laying down a shifting percussion foundation for eloquent solos by Perdomo and the saxophonists. It is a balanced and thoughtful album.
Oldish: Less Brief
Eric Felten, T-Bop (Soul Note). Conducting research, I came across this first album by the trombonist. Somehow, it got by me when it was released in 1993. Not long out of graduate school when he recorded it, Felten made his debut in the heavy, even intimidating, trombone company of Jimmy Knepper (1927-2003), one of the great unconventional thinkers and players among improvising musicians. On some tracks, the third horn is a tenor saxophone played by Joshua Redman barely known when the album was made in 1992. He was a Harvard friend of Felten. Redman’s own first album come out the following year. The rhythm section was pianist Jonny King, bassists Paul Henry or Paul LaDuca and drummer Jorge Rossy, emerging Boston-area musicians roughly Felten’s age. King’s boppish work here made me decide to go back and pay closer attention to some of his own recordings. Rossy is noted for his association with pianist Brad Mehldau and as the unofficial house drummer for Fresh Sound Records.
More or less in the J.J. Johnson camp, Felten contrasts with Knepper’s languid trickiness, although at moments he seems inclined to emulate it. With one of the most tromboney of trombonists standing by as he solos, if Felten is a tad nervous, well, who wouldn’t be? In any case, they sound as if they’re having the time of their lives. The joy of their counterpoint in the last chorus of “T-Bop” is infectious. Over the intervening 17 years, Redman’s work has taken on sophistication and complexity. Here, he wears simplicity and directness on his sleeve. His earnestness is refreshing. All of the pieces but “Stella By Starlight” and “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry” are by Felten the developing composer. “On Second Thought” is an amusingly fractured line on “I Got Rhythm” changes, “Hold Back the Dawn” a brooding ballad worthy of a good lyric. “Deconstruction” is a minor exercise with Latin tendencies that encourages the musicians, particularly Redman, to take their solos to the border of free playing. “Ontology” is a questioning blues line appropriate to its title. There is no question about “Blues for Lester Dubree;” it’s down-home and funky and kicks off with a Louis Armstrong quote. “Delphi” would have been at home in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers book.
Felten has gone on to refine his trombone playing, lead a big band in Washington, DC, develop as a singer, publish a book and write a general-interest column in The Wall Street Journal. His second CD included Joe Lovano, Randy Brecker and Bob Mintzer. His tribute to Mel Tormé and Marty Paich featured a who’s-who of west coast jazz stars, among them Herb Geller and Jack Sheldon. T-Bop is evidently rare as a physical object but available as an MP3 download. If you missed it the first time around, as I did, you may want to investigate it.

Graham Collier, directing 14 Jackson Pollocks (GCM). Long before he wrote his recent book, Graham Collier’s music made it plain that Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans were profound influences on his work. Collier followed Ellington’s and Mingus’s lead in fashioning pieces with his soloists in mind rather than the common concept of arrangements into which a leader could plug whatever soloist was at hand. As for Evans, I must say that I heard in Collier’s earlier recordings more of the Evans of “La Nevada” or “El Matador” – roiling, abstract patterns under soloists — than of the tonal tapestries in, say, Sketches of Spain. I still do. Collier amalgamated his inspirations into an orchestral style that coalesced at a moment in the late 1960s when musicians and listeners in Great Britain were ready to expand their ideas about what constituted jazz.
Collier was his own bassist for years before he concentrated entirely on composing, arranging and leading. Among the members of his bands were adventurous players including saxophonists John Surman and Art Themen, trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Harry Beckett and drummer John Marshall. In directing 14 Jackson Pollocks, Collier reaches distillation of the notion that the orchestra, the written music and the improvising soloist comprise a trinity, each element inseparable from the other. The music makes obvious what the CD title means, unless you don’t know who Jackson Pollock was. The two-CD set consists of music recorded at concerts in London in 1997 and 2004. The astonishing Beckett, Themen and Marshall are among the players, along with pianist Roger Dean, bassist Jeff Clyne and others who long since absorbed Collier’s ethos of individual independence amidst collective dependence.
The music has something in common with the free jazz that emerged in the United States in the sixties, but where free jazz often fell by the weight of its pretensions of liberation from guidelines, Collier’s coalesces around his frameworks. His composing and arranging dictates, or suggests, shape, harmonic character and rhythmic direction of the solos. He infuses much of his music with wry humor at which titles like “Between a Donkey and a Rolls Royce” and “An Alternate Low Circus Ballad” can only hint. In any case, humor is only an element In Collier’s work, important but minor. He produces serious music that makes demands on its listeners and gives generous compensation to those who welcome it on its terms.
Efrat Alony, Alony (Enja). Bob Brookmeyer called my attention to this Israeli singer who has had success in Germany’s avant circles. In Brookmeyer’s words, “She is very gifted and very motivated–into electronics, arranging, always composing her own stuff. Been in Berlin for 15 years.” He thinks she deserves wider exposure. After spending a couple of hours of a long motor trip with her CD, I agree.
Alony’s voice, round and spacious, sounds classically trained. It is in the mezzo range, although she sometimes takes it higher, maintaining fullness and pitch unless she is purposely bending notes, which she occasionally does to great effect. The songs on Alony are not standards; she wrote most of the lyrics and music, with contributions from pianist Mark Reinke and one piece from the Israeli songwriter-singer Etti Ankri. In addition, Alony set to music William Butler Yeats’ bittersweet poem, “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.” Reinke and drummer Christian Thomé are the primary accompanists. They also provide electronic effects. A string quartet contributes backing and atmospherics. Alony now and then overdubs voices in unison or counterpoint. There’s a lot going on, but it’s all integrated, allowing concentration on the music as a whole. At their best, Alony’s lyrics achieve a haiku-like sensibility that distinguishes superior art songs:
Recollecting
fading shadows of joy
I slowly unlock the shackles of thought
my safeguard
freeing feelings I lost
bewitchment
delight
sweet longing
You are unlikely to find Alony at your corner record store. It is available as a download from Amazon and, evidently, as a CD only from the Enja web site. YouTube has a clever promotional video of “Lights On/Off,” the song that opens the album.
I’m not sure that there is a category for what Alony does. I’m not sure that there should be. Call it music.
We’ll have more Recent Listening soon. Well, reasonably soon.

Yakima, Washington
The recent CD by pianist Bill Anschell and soprano saxophonist Brent Jensen is called We Couldn’t Agree More. The title is inaccurate. In an intimate concert last weekend at The Seasons, they were in even greater agreement, with more daring and more complexity.
The duo’s approach is to play well-known tunes without well-known routines; no arrangements, no obvious statement of melody, no predetermined tempos or key signatures. They call on their experience, ears and reflexes. That may read like a description of free jazz at its freest, but Jensen and Anschell operate in standard song forms. “We never play a tune the same way twice,” Anschell told the audience, “and we never know which way it’s going to go.” At The Seasons, Jensen made the first move after Anschell said he had no idea what tune his partner had chosen. Jensen began improvising on his curved soprano. Anschell listened intently as Jensen played nowhere near the melody on the chords of “It Could Happen To You.” After a chorus, Anschell slid in under him with counterpoint. They were off and running through a program that also included “Autumn Leaves,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Squeeze Me,” “All Of You,” “Willow Weep For Me,” “Beautiful Love” and an Anschell composition, “Dreamscape.”
“Squeeze Me” developed into an exercise in rubato–squared. With no bassist or drummer to dictate time, the tempo sped, slowed and undulated. At moments it seemed in suspension, and yet the two were swinging. “All Of You” was laced with similar interior time play, further convoluted by stop-time anticipation of one another’s phrases and Anschell’s broken metre in the left hand. Quotes abounded through the set, none more amusing than Jensen’s paraphrase of “Straight No Chaser” as he and Anschell simultaneously diverted “I’m Old Fashioned” through the West Indies for a calypso interlude.
Jensen set up a tune with phrases that seemed headed toward “Have You Met Miss Jones?” but it turned out to be “Willow Weep For Me” and included a startling series of interval leaps by Jensen from tenor sax territory up to clarinet range. Anschell followed with passages of stride piano. In line with the Anschell-Jensen operating principle of surprise, the stride receded and advanced in a pattern no listener could have anticipated, swinging all the while. The finale began with a Rachmaninoffian piano introduction that mystified the audience but delivered a clue to Jensen, who grinned and melded into “Beautiful Love.” The duo worked the piece into a brief passage that sounded like gospel music and ended the evening proving that minor keys do not necessarily mean gloom, sadness or remorse.
The Seasons is a former church with perfect acoustics. Its perfection has been distorted time and again by jazz groups insisting on amplification where none is needed. Jensen and Anschell played music there the way God intended, acoustically.
It was glorious.

Hearty congratulations to Doug McLennan, pioneer web chronicler of the arts. He is artsjournal.com‘s founder, commander-in-chief and unfailingly patient rescuer of digitally challenged bloggers like me. Terry Teachout, who has been aboard nearly the whole time, reminds me by way of his blog that artsjournal.com is ten years old this week. Five years ago, Terry suggested that I do a blog and introduced me to McLennan. Doug let me under his umbrella into the company of a remarkable stable of arts experts. I am deeply grateful to him and Terry. For Doug’s thoughts on the occasion, go here. Best wishes to him for many more years of shedding light on the arts.