Archive | February, 2009

E.S.T. – Tuesday Wonderland

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio sounds like the most balanced and smartest modern ‘jazz’ piano trio of the ones I’ve heard. It’s post-everything: it’s not ironic, not ‘fusion’ in any way – it feels like a logical growth path for jazz. It’s sad that Svensson died in a scuba diving accident last year. This tune sounds [...]

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Thelonious Monk’s two words

Thelonious Monk, from Library and Archives Canada via Wikimedia Commons Seen today on Wikipedia: Bassist Al McKibbon, who had known Monk for over twenty years and played on his final tour in 1971, later said: “On that tour Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn’t say ‘Good morning’, ‘Goodnight’, [...]

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Chick and Hiromi Duet

Listening to: Chick Corea & Hiromi Uehara, Duet

Cascading, effervescent, energetic, virtuoso, surprising, accomplished. You’d need a stream of adjectives to describe how these two play together. An easier way to say it might be to think of four hands attached, somehow, to the same brain. An orchestra of pianos, perfectly conducted by a single musical mind. This record is the result of [...]

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Winter Tires

Combatting winter neglect

When it’s winter, I find I let things slide. Or maybe they slide all by themselves, and I just don’t do anything about them. That’s often because I find I’m quite unaware that something needs doing. Take, for instance, some inflation issues I encountered recently (no, not of the economic kind…). This is the first [...]

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UB40 Twenty Four Seven

Listening to: UB40, Twentyfourseven

A review of UB40′s Twentyfourseven (2008) An elegant, slightly dark and dubby swansong, Twentyfourseven affirms for the last time what a strong and intelligent reggae band UB40 was. Forging its own path on the periphery of reggae, and – at the same time – somehow propelling the genre into the future by keeping it anchored [...]

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2010 The Return Book Cover

Currently reading: Books about 2012

Also, an insightful and entertaining review of Toward 2012 from the New York Times. Many of the essays are available at Reality Sandwich.

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handwriting font

A font in your own handwriting

YourFonts offers a free online utility to create a TrueType font based on your handwriting. Basically, you download a 2-page PDF form that you print out and fill in, in your handwriting. Then you scan the two pages and upload them to YourFonts. There, they are processed into a TrueType font that you can download [...]

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