Jay Wrote

Appreciation of Paul Metzger at Khyber Pass. Thursday night, Grand Av.  2 doors east of Snelling, string man Paul Metzger took listeners to extended hikes through instrumental, compositional and cultural landscapes.  It was my first time hearing St. Paul’s Metzger.  The instruments - one a banjo, the other a guitar, had each been crafted to take a set of strings arranged harp-style running off each neck.  A bow.  A perfectly-sized powered speaker.   To  my mind Metzger’s first piece, while unnamed, was a tribute to our host, Emel, owner of the tiny restaurant and artist of wonderful abstract paintings on the walls.  The predominant feeling of the banjo-harp display was eastern - Afghan perhaps, but I am not sure.  Metzger plucked, strummed, hammered, bowed, scraped and pushed out notes by waving the banjo from and back to his chest, stirring bits of echo into the room.  The banjo body subbed nicely as a tabla.   Left ...

Parsing Monk’s Dream (s) and the Vinyl-Digital Divide. This album is embedded in my deepest musical memories. (fn1)  Thelonious Monk’s album was one of four or five my dad purchased in the early 1960s. From our record collection I had few choices.  Most striking visually were the red, really red, records consisting of a series of announcements: “The whippoorwill, the whippoorwill” then the 4 seconds of bird song. “The blue jay, the blue jay.” Five records from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Monk’s Dream , Monk’s Blues and Criss Cross made me a jazz fan for life. I can’t say if these were mono or stereo records. I think we did not get a stereo system until 1968 so my earliest experience was surely of extremely low fidelity. Today I have 2 versions of Monk’s Dream , a 1988 Columbia digitally remastered LP and a 2002 Columbia compact disc with different 24 bit remastering and 4 additional takes of tunes from the original album. This was Thelonious Monk at the peak of his populari...

Morning Moves A shadow dances the foxtrot among this morning's leaves trading and chasing partners,  the erratic monarch and ever-shifting sun king.