Jazz Casual was series on NET (the public television predecessor to PBS) which ran for a total of 31 episodes between 1960 and 1968. Each episode featured a half-hour set from a jazz legend, hosted by music critic Ralph Gleason. … Continue reading The Author Is Not So Sure About This Day Thread (5/27)
Carol Kaye is a guitar and electric bass player whom you’ve undoubtedly heard, even if you’ve never heard of her. Born in Washington State in 1935, her family moved to Los Angeles in 1942. Both of her parents were professional … Continue reading The Day Thread Lays Down A Funky Groove (4/7)
Appalachian Spring is a ballet with choreography by Martha Graham and music by Aaron Copland. Copland received a commission to compose a new ballet for Graham in 1942. After many delays (because he was busy writing film scores in L.A.,) … Continue reading The 1/26 Day Thread Wins The Pulitzer Prize
Tonight at Hey Nonny in Arlington Heights, IL will be the album release party for Return to the Enchanted Forest by Heisenberg Uncertainty Players. Every track on the album is an original composition or arrangement by our bandleader, John Dorhauer. … Continue reading The 1/23 Day Thread Drops A New Album
The Montreux Jazz Festival is held every July, and in 1996, your humble Resident Smartass had the honor of being a member of the Northern Illinois University Jazz Ensemble which was invited to perform there. The original plan was for … Continue reading The 1/22 Day Thread Hangs Out With Chaka Khan
For those familiar with Last Tango in Paris: no, not that Maria Schneider. Maria Schneider is a composer whose weapon of choice is the 18-piece big band. The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra has released nine studio albums which have been … Continue reading The Maria Schneider Day Thread (1/14)
Yes, that’s ‘Bird’, singular, not ‘birds’. Because while ornithology is the study of birds, “Ornithology” is a song by Charlie Parker, a.k.a. “Bird”. Parker – along with trumpeter Benny Harris – wrote the tune as a contrafact, meaning that they … Continue reading The 1/13 Day Thread Studies Bird
No system is perfect, and that’s certainly the case with Disqus, the service which makes The Avocado possible. And while our Great and Powerful Mods do what they can with the time and energy they have, it’s not possible to … Continue reading The 12/30 Day Thread Has You All Blocked
The songwriter Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidore Beilin in Tyumen, Siberia, Imperial Russia, in 1888. His father was a cantor originally from a village in what is now Belarus; the move to Siberia was presumably because there was a … Continue reading The 12/18 Night Thread Celebrates Irving Berlin
After graduating college in the late ’60s with a degree in electrical engineering, my dad went to work for the Teletype Corporation. Teletype had been a subsidiary of AT&T since 1930, with roots dating back to 1906. Teletype made teleprinters, … Continue reading The Day Thread Sends A Text (12/16)
Karma was an album recorded by a group of musicians led by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in February of 1969 and released in May of that year. The recording sessions took place at RCA Studios in NYC, and the album was … Continue reading The Night Thread Has A Master Plan For Dec. 2
Patricia Barber is a jazz vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. She was born in Chicago, which has always been her permanent home. She has released over a dozen albums since her debut in 1989. I hadn’t even heard of her when, … Continue reading The Day Thread Starts December On The Right Foot With Patricia Barber
Moving objects from one place to another via pneumatic tube was first proposed as far back as 1812. The London Pneumatic Despatch Company was founded in 1859, and operated an underground railway system in London from 1863 until 1874. Capsules … Continue reading The 11/13 Day Thread Is A Series Of Tubes
November 11 is a federal holiday in the United States, initially known as Armistice Day but later observed as Veterans Day. Similarly, it’s observed as Remembrance Day across the British Commonwealth countries. It was on November 11, 1918, that a … Continue reading The Day Thread Calls For A Truce (11/11)
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a freighter ship which worked the Great Lakes from her launch in 1958 until she sank with all 29 hands in a storm in Lake Superior on the evening of November 10, 1975. Plenty of … Continue reading The Night Thread Pours One Out For The SS Edmund Fitzgerald
Experiments with adding stereo sound to television broadcasts began in 1958, when ABC broadcast several episodes of The Lawrence Welk Show with two-channel audio. This was accomplished by sending one channel over the TV signal as normal, and the other … Continue reading The 11/6 Day Thread Is Presented In Stereo
Heisenberg Uncertainty Players is a 17-piece big band based in Chicago led by founder John Dorhauer. Yours truly started sitting in with the band on occasion about a decade ago, then got invited to join full time in 2019. We … Continue reading The Night Thread Shamelessly Self-Promotes
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about some of the earliest efforts at digital audio recording. I concentrated mostly on systems developed by Denon and Sony which became widely adopted (but also introduced some drawbacks which have made the lives … Continue reading The Day Thread Finds A Mistake In Wikipedia (10/22)
Alexander Scriabin was born in Moscow in 1871, and died there in 1915. He studied piano and composition at the Moscow Conservatory, but graduated with only a degree in piano performance – his composition teacher lost patience with Scriabin because … Continue reading The Night Thread Gets Ecstatic (10/19)
Welcome to my first ever Day Thread! Please be gentle with me, as I want this to be special. The fundamental concept behind digital audio recording dates back as far as 1938, but the history of digital recordings getting released … Continue reading The Day Thread Goes Digital
