Wes Phillips

For Martin Luther King day, here's John Coltrane's haunting "Alabama," which, according to Sascha Feinstein and Craig Werner, was based on the rhythms of the eulogy Martin Luther King delivered at the funeral for the four girls slain when their church was dynamited in Birmingham.

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Speaking of having fun . . . .

A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.

Albert Fuller has died. I enjoyed his playing a lot and, the one time I met him—we shared the elevator to Weill Recital Hall—he was gracious enough to tell me about the night he met Igor Stravinsky.

I'm just here for the beer.

The name of the essay is "Fervor," and that's what Ross writes with. If you can read the last paragraph of this tribute to Ms. Hunt Lieberson without tearing up, you have my condolences.

"If Alex were a dog, he would be 189 years old. But he's a parrot and he's 27. In parrot years that's 27. Unless Alex chokes on a nut or falls out of his cage, he should live another 50 years. In a perfect world, healthy parrots can live 80 to 90 years."