Category: Personal

Richard Kamins | See! Hear!: Music from Here and There

One of the beauties of the internet, and posting full show archives, is that your show can be reviewed by writers whose expense accounts likely won’t cover cab fare from Hartford to New Orleans. I got a nice email from Richard Kamins, who writes about music for the Hartford Courant, letting me know that he had reviewed the JAQ show at Open Ears, via the mp3 archive. Pretty cool, eh?

To make it even cooler, it is a great review. Click the link below and scroll down to read it.

Richard Kamins | See! Hear!: Music from Here and There

Chicken wire ?!?

When I was in college, one of our favorite past times, when we were too broke to go out and hear music, was watching the Blues Brothers (the real one, not that 2000 sacrilege). Many of my early gigs were with horn sections in cover bands, and Blues Brothers fare was a staple of our rep.

These days, I get to play a bit with the fabulous blues singer Luther Kent. It is a large band with 6 horns, and when the right rhythm section is there, they are bad enough to turn goat piss into gasoline. Imagine my delight last night, when Blue Lou Marini showed up and sat in for much of the second set. His presence lit an extra little fire under the band, and he seemed like a genuinely nice cat. It was lots of fun.

Let your audience get to know you

I enjoy reading the blogs of other musicians. Part of the reason for blogging is the self expression, but a big part is also fan/customer relations. In this “why should I buy what I can download for free” world, one theory about maintaining sales is to develop relationships (or perceived relationships) with your audience. If people like you or connect with you on an extra musical level, they are more likely to support the business aspect of your art, at least in theory.

I like reading The Bad Plus’ blog, Do the Math. I own their CD “These Are The Vistas” and have enjoyed listening to it, but I never got on the “buy every new CD” track with them. This video from this post made me go directly to iTunes and buy “Prog.”

It is similar to my old cruise ship buffet theory that as long as I ate an apple along with the 7 chocolate eclairs that it was all cool.

Earl Turbinton RIP

New Orleans jazz pioneer Turbinton dies – Times-Picayune – NOLA.com

Earl Turbinton died this past week. Earl was a saxophonist whose personal style covered many spaces, from hard swinging bop lines, to soulful bluesy sounds, to some pretty out stuff. He was very active in New Orleans in the late 80’s, when I had just moved to town, and was soaking up lots of live music. I loved hearing Earl, and as I reflect on it now, I realize it was because he could (and did) go so many different places musically. It’s odd how sometimes we only realize how influential a musician was on our own concept much later than the original point of influence. At the time, Earl was very encouraging to us young guys. May he rest in peace, and be long remembered.

WOW! Internet scamming goes old school.

I just got a phone call on my home phone from someone who asked for me by name, and proceeded to tell me (in heavily accented and awkward English) how odd it was for him to contact me like this, since we do not know each other, but something has happened at his hospital in the UK, and his patient has named me as next of kin, and…

That is where I hung up. Unknown name, Unknown number, says the caller ID. Moments later the phone rang again. Unknown name and number again. I didn’t answer, he didn’t leave a message.

The internet scammers have come full circle, gone old school, reconnected with their telephone scammer beginnings. It is the circle of life scam.