Fred Kaplan

I am hereby boycotting Keith Jarrett. It’s a shame. He’s one of the great jazz pianists, but he’s just become too big a jerk—and, at a time when America has an ugly image in the world, a dreadful ambassador. Here’s <A HREF="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB9mMABRM0c&quot; >
footage</A> of him cursing Italian jazz fans for taking his picture as he approached the stage, before he even started playing, at the Umbria Jazz Festival. These are people who paid over $100 for what he called the “privilege” of hearing him play. There are polite ways to ask people not to take pictures. You don’t have to treat them like scum.

Insider music biz stuff should in most cases stay that way because normal folk, what I like to call "civilians," don't care about who said what to whom in the bowels of some label HQ in Burbank or Manhattan. There's also something pitifully self-indulgent and exclusionary and ultimately pathetic about people who are in the know about the music biz and live to tell you about it.

"I wasn't scared," says Huckleberry. "I've seen Bagheera royally PO'd." Actually, he's generally the cause.

Skunk Baxter has a new gig. After all, Steely Dan goes for years between tours.

Jon Carroll has a fine <A HREF="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/…; this morning (no surprise there) that meanders from his thoughts on <I>Die Hard</I> (very Aristotlian) to the making of the Jeep and how the humvee influences our presence in Iraq.

<I>Cafe Aman</I> posts an Antonio Machado poem, thanking Osvaldo Golijov for introducing him to it. I wish I could name drop OG&mdash;I think that he and Jennifer Higdon are the most consistently satisfying composers writing today.

I'm a total Neil Gaiman fanboy, so I'm giddy with anticipation of the theatrical release of <I>Stardust</I> tomorrow. I just re-read the book and was delighted to find it as charming as when I first devoured it in 1999.