The Jazz Journalists Association, a group of mainly New York-based jazz critics and writers, handed out its 2007 awards Thursday afternoon. Here are the winners, followed in parentheses by the musician that I voted for in each category:
Lifetime Achievement: Andrew Hill
(I voted for Paul Motian. Hill was a giant, and he died this year after a long struggle with cancer; but sentiment aside, Motian’s drumming has been the stronger influence, and I figured this award should sometimes go to the living.)
Musician of the Year: Ornette Coleman
(Ornette Coleman. Who else.)
Up…
Those rubber duckies oceanographers have been tracking since 1992 are about to make landfall in the UK. Not the first time Old Blighty has been menaced by an armada.
Bagheera, like all cats, is a lawyer. It's not a table, it's a counter, in the sun—in the cattery. Huckleberry, on the other hand, just brazens it out. What table? Oh, the one beneath me? Are you sure that counts? Well, I was tired of sitting here anyway. It just goes to show, you never know what lurks in some men's souls. White House press spokesman Tony Snow playing a not-at-all-terrible blues flute. For the video (via YouTube and Matt Yglesias' blog), click here.
I spend too much time looking down: at the ground, at my keyboard, at pages of copy.
I stopped for a minute, got up from my seat, turned to the window, and looked up. Funny thing: I'd never realized that I could see this bit of the Empire State Building from here.
Tim Adams was interviewing James Watson one day when he innocently remarked upon the "perfect simplicity" of Watson/Crick's revelation of the genetic code.
Watson decided to have a bit of fun. "If it's so simple, perhaps you'd explain it to me," he said.
Could you do it? Or explain why the sky is blue, what happens to salt when you add water, or even name the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Hint: It's like a teenager.)
Be sure to take the quiz.
Mark Story photographs faces that have been lived in.
A statistical analysis of literature yields some surprises.
"In the weeks after my husband moved out, I received an email from someone offering to help me clean the house or cook, an email that evokes images of dishes piling up in the sink, flies hovering around half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches, laundry accumulating. I wonder where these nightmarish visions of our domestic situation are coming from. Why would the departure of my husband launch me and my daughter into a life of squalor? Someone else writes: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved…
