Magnolia Blossoms

The demands of teaching both online and in the classroom this semester have prevented me from providing more frequent posts. It has been a constant struggle trying to maintain a semblance of control over the grading.

I will be adding a few pictures occasionally, beginning with these magnolia blossoms. Providing the pictures of these blossoms doesn't fully represent the sensory experience of standing within their scent, as the wind moves the branches away from the camera lens, altering the reflections of the branches against the petals.

These pictures come from two days, one when the blossoms had just started to open and one when the blossoms had survived a night of near freezing temperatures and several days of strong winds. These pictures are the best ones from the 450 shots that I took. I used several different settings and tried different strengths and different combinations of close up lens.

Clicking on each picture will enlarge it in a separate window.

Where Are the Warm Days of Years Past

This year is one in which I am looking forward to warmer weather. One weather forecaster in Kansas City is calling for winter to hang around until at least the vernal equinox. Judging from the kind of weather we have been having, this spring (April especially) looks like it will be an active one when I only want clear skies and quiet nights.

My son tells me that he likes winter and doesn't mind having it continue for a while longer. I remember feeling the same way when I was much younger. Winter used to be my favorite season. The winters I knew in Maryland, in Turkey, and in England while I was growing up didn't prepare me for the winters I experienced when I moved to Kansas. My second winter in Kansas I rented a one-bedroom house in Concordia that had drafty windows and doors, no heating except for an old fashioned gas stove in the kitchen, and virtually no insulation. Although I added plastic sheeting to the windows, that preventive measure didn't make the house any warmer. I spent most of my evenings sitting next to that gas stove. Because I had almost no bedding of my own, a friend also gave me a blanket that he had gotten from the hospital where he worked. The year before I had rented a studio apartment that came supplied with bedding.

Probably my coldest winter was the year that I spent living in a basement in Manhattan. The upstairs tenant had control over the thermostat. He used to go away for the weekend and leave the thermostat at what seemed like a low setting. Fortunately, the landlord lived nearby and adjusted the thermostat for me a few times. He also bought a portable baseboard heater that helped in the evenings when I was sitting at the kitchen table and grading essays as a graduate teaching assistant or writing essays for my own classes.

While living in Oklahoma, I left my office window open in the winter so that I could let a fan pull the cigarette smoke outside. I didn't want to expose my wife to my secondhand smoke. Fortunately, I quit smoking during our second winter in Oklahoma. Shutting the window made my office so much more pleasant. The landlord also installed central heating in that house the following year. My 16th year as a nonsmoker went virtually unnoticed on January 22, by the way.

Housebound

Like much of this country and like Europe, this part of Kansas has been cold and snowy for three weeks now. Tonight and tomorrow will be our lowest temperatures, approximately -6. It isn't often that the cold weather remains here for longer than a few days.

There is something to be said for having a constant temperature of, say, 75 degrees, from one day to another. That certainty eliminates having to alter one's plans when going outside. I'm not ready to move to Texas or Florida or southern California, however.

I’ve been housebound for four days now. The idea of cabin fever seemed like a strange concept when I first heard the term. When I was young, I actually idealized secluding myself away from the world with a woman, much like Yuri and Lara at Varykino in Doctor Zhivago, not realizing how difficult it would have been finding drinking water and food, without making the trip in the brutal cold to Yuriatin. Since my wife and I are not yet teaching during the coming semester, we didn’t have to commute the past few days. We were lucky. Judging from what I saw on the television, the traffic on the freeways in Kansas City was often reduced to one lane, making it necessary for those commuters to leave the house much earlier in the morning. After these four days of remaining inside, I am looking forward to getting out of the house on Saturday to do more than shovel the driveway. I just wish it were possible to take a walk without risking frostbite.

A Selection of Jazz From 2009

While I admit having heard only a limited number of the Jazz CD's that were released in 2009, my selections for the best releases appear below.

Eberhard Weber's reissue is particularly important because it brings together those recordings when Weber was involved with the group named Colours. This reissue contains three titles, Yellow Fields (1975), Silent Feet(1977), and Little Movements (1980). If you didn't purchase these albums when they were first released or weren't alive when they were released, I recommend getting them now. These albums are all essential recordings. Prior to this reissue, Yellow Fields was particularly hard to find on CD in this country. I ended up having to order my copy a few years ago directly from Europe.

Like the bassist Eberhard Weber, Jan Garbarek, who plays tenor and soprano saxophone, is another jazz artist who is considered a virtuoso of his instrument and a major contributor to jazz during the past thirty-five years or so; some of his albums are considered essential recordings for anyone who wishes to assemble a jazz library. A previous post of mine goes into more depth about Jan Garbarek.

Vassilis Tsabropoulos is a Greek pianist who trained to play classical music and who has made the crossover to jazz. The Promise is his solo recording.

Anouar Brahem is considered a master of the oud. I have mentioned his album Le Pas du Chat Noir in a previous post. The Astounding Eyes of Rita is less contemplative and less melancholy than that album.

Lars Danielsson, the Swedist bassist, has been gaining more critical attention since the release of Pasodoble in 2007. A thorough sampling of his work can be found at YouTube.

Diego Barber is a young guitarist who has only recorded this one CD as a leader. This CD also features the members of Fly, that is, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, and Jeff Ballard. Both Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard make up the new Brad Mehldau trio.

One way to test the validity of my selections is to compare them with the other best of lists that will be appearing at other websites like Jazz Breakfast , AllAboutJazz , and JazzAfterHours .