It was a morning for music in my head. I think I may have been delirious since I didn’t turn on my fan last night. I didn’t realize it until the room was starting to grow lighter that something was amiss. I had tossed and turned for a bit and…

One thing that goes well with gospel music from the 1950s and 1960s is organ music. It is true: I am a fan of the pipe organ and take great pleasure in hearing one that is well-played, as they often are in churches. Robert Götzfried offers a photographic exploration of…

Back when jazz was my second heartbeat, gospel was likely my first. My Nana, my dad’s mom, was my caregiver before I started school. She often sent me upstairs to put a stack of records on for her. She liked it when I made a mix (I guess I was…

I mentioned Donald Fagen yesterday, which made me go back in time. Do you remember the library? I mean, when we had card catalogs and dusty books with moth-eaten pages and a section just for kids and storybook time and the library lady who wore her glasses on a chain…

I think this will be the last hip-hop related post in the series. No promises, but that’s how it feels today. It seems the 1980s were quite the era for hip-hop from all over. It’s likely because that’s when television got in the mix with cable and MTV. However, I…

Speaking of hip-hop and DJ Premier, Gang Starr became a favorite along the way as well while I was at WRSU. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jseZP4K6rkg&w=560&h=315] It was an interesting time; there weren’t many DJs of color on air outside of weekend specialty programming, so most of the world music, hip-hop, jazz, and…

I mentioned discovering Wynton Marsalis’ other musically inclined relatives after digging into his discography. However, I came to know his brother Branford from a different path. The name Buckshot LeFonque goes back farther than the group B. Marsalis put together to Cannonball Adderly. However, as my love of hip-hop continued…

Speaking of jazz, it has played a major role in my life since … likely since before birth. My dad was a big jazz fan and he and I spent a lot of time together, listening. Have you ever heard a piece of music and immediately understood the time and…

It’s interesting the things we do to ‘survive’. I might have told part of this story before, but when I was an undergrad, I found myself rather bereft of cash monies to put food in the fridge and eventually, when I got one, gas in the car. Someone hipped me…

There’s a verse in the Bible that suggests ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child …’. It’s true. When I first heard Horace Silver (it was the Doin the Thing album though), laying in the middle of the living room floor of my parents’ house, reading the…