Today is my 55th birthday. The Sammy Hagar tune “I Can’t Drive 55” keeps running through my head. It occurs to me that someday my kids will take my car keys away from me. After all, I am creeping closer to that golden age. I just hope to God that when they do, it’s the result of a high speed chase across multiple counties and not because of some embarrassing fender bender in a Costco parking lot. But back to the birthday, it’s a weird…
We’re all reeling from this week’s heartbreaking news about Robin William’s suicide. He was a ferocious soul with a soaring talent. He grabbed our hearts with the first “nanu nanu” and his mad unpredictable genius delighted us for decades. Oh how we loved him. And now in the wake of his death, we collectively grapple with this crushing loss and with the hard truth of Robin’s long battle with depression. Obviously, I don’t know any details about his life or the events leading up to…
Maybe it will all make sense in the end. Maybe things will all tie up neatly and in our last gasp, we will say: "Aah…Now I get it." Maybe our longing will be sated and our curiosity will be satisfied. Maybe there’s a plausible explanation for every second we’ve spent here. But we don’t know that now. We can’t know that. We have to bake a little longer. Still, we want respite from this ambiguity. We jump up and down impatiently like a…
A few days ago, my friend Jason Parker, trumpeter, bandleader, educator and KPLU blogger, wrote a post entitled “Why Jazz Fans Shouldn’t Be So Quick to Dismiss Pop Music.” Jason is a member of a Facebook group “Jam of the Week” and wrote his post in response to negative comments that some “jazz snobs” had made about pop music. Jason makes a lot of good points. He questions the logic behind cutting oneself off from an entire genre of music. He also gives examples of…
