Trying to pick a song from Nina Simone’s catalog to feature is a fun challenge. There are so many wonderful albums and styles to pick from it takes a while just to narrow a search down to a dozen songs, let alone one. In the end I have to go with her live rendition of [...]
One of the challenges I had growing up was finding music my parents and I could agree on. We didn’t share a lot of common ground so it was always a challenge to find something to put on in the background during dinner or when we were all in the living room together. Some form [...]
Some weekends things fly by so quickly you only realize how much fun things were as Sunday starts to fade into Monday morning. The best days are those that are a blur of activity punctuated only with pauses for sleep, maybe coffee and a deep breath before starting again.
Good songs are also like that - [...]
When you say “Gil Scott-Heron,” most people say “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and the conversation ends there. The truth is that Scott-Heron hit a peak with that song but he still had a few more great songs to come. “B-Movie” is part song, part poetry, part oral tradition of what life was like [...]
Bill Evans isn’t the jazz pianist I think of first when asked about favorites but I find myself coming back to his albums time and again. His version of “Autumn Leaves” seems to sneak into lots of mixes and for every Erroll Garner disc I listen to I’m just as likely to listen to Evans [...]
I loathed the song “Misty” the first few times I heard it. I only knew the song as bit of torture that Johnny Mathis had inflicted on the world in the early days of AM radio. The terrible lyrics and Mathis’ voice were unbearable to me and I recall muttering “this song sucks so hard” [...]
“Goody Goody” is one of the better breakup songs ever written but only a few artists have really taken advantage of it. The song came out of the big-band swing era and most artists have used it that way - a high-energy track to get people on the floor and let the full band wail [...]