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 after stickily making my way to the bathroom, came back to discover the fan button was firmly off. I flipped it on for a bit and stretched out for a few more minutes before starting the day, proper. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F766nMg5-IE&w=560&h=315] Dionne Warwick’s version of ‘Walk On By’ is so sunny,…

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 some (as it seems to me) modern pipe organs in his exhibit, titled simply as ‘Pipes’. I want to fly off to Germany and listen to them all, of course. As a kid, my Nana would go to Philadelphia at the holidays especially. We’d ride the bus, the El, and…

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 destined to be in radio at some point). Rev. James Cleveland was a favorite of hers; she had several of his albums. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJL740aqP5Y&w=560&h=315] However, my favorite was Ms. Mahalia Jackson. She was a prolific singer; so many come to mind, but Didn’t it Rain was one we listened to…

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 and shushed everyone? The library where I grew up was my haven. it was a home away from home, where I gained an immunity to the smell of paper, the feel of decayed pages, and learned to dance to the sound of the machine they used to imprint a library…

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 first saw the video for Slick Rick’s ‘Children’s Story’ on a little back-woods local channel, known for playing all sorts of things. It’s also the first place I saw Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and Donald Fagen (yes, these are the links to those early videos I remember …).

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 gospel went to those shows. I did a stint as music director and worked hard to change that. Since I got to open all the music when it came in, I put albums like Gang Starr’s in for regular rotation. It took time and conversation to convince the specialty show…

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 to fuel the vestiges of fire in my weary soul in 1994, this album was life. I cried (notice a theme over these days?) more than once as I sang along with songs like ‘Another Day’ and wanted to dash off and join the Panthers as I boiled over the…

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 space it was meant to represent? My dad and I went to see Wynton Marsalis at the Trenton War Memorial. It’s now called the Patriot’s Memorial or something. I don’t recall when it was, and I can’t find information on that show, but I know it was there. Being a…

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 to the idea of selling plasma. There was a little place not far from campus; the bus stopped in the strip mall across the street, so it was convenient. I recall hearing that some people received tidy sums for theirs, including a man and a woman who rode the train…

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 liner notes as hard bop flowed through the house (thanks to my dad’s ingenious wiring — yeah, we had surround sound before there was such a thing), I knew I would grow up to marry this man. Not as he would be by the time I was marrying age (he…