Missouri River Flooding Redux

Like many other locations along the Missouri River, the place where I live is experiencing flooding. Only a few parts of the city are prone to flooding, mostly those areas close to the river, such as Riverfront Park, the sewage treatment plant, and Landing Park. Leavenworth, unlike some of the other cities along the Missouri, increases in elevation as one travels west. The bluffs on this side of the river are what led Colonel Leavenworth to violate his orders regarding the fort he was instructed to create. Finding the eastern side of the river to be a floodplain and potentially unhealthy because of the mosquitoes, he chose to enter into Indian territory and to build his fort on the bluffs overlooking the river and, coincidentally, at the same location where the French had created a fort previously.

The photos below of Landing Park record the rising water, beginning in late May, with the earliest ones appearing at the bottom of the post. Clicking on any one picture will increase its size.

Even though there have been health warnings regarding the presence of E.coli because of the sewage treatment plants upriver not treating their waste, there are still people fishing in these flood waters--either for recreation or out of desperation.

Magnolia Blossoms_2011

My annual collection of magnolia blossoms appear below. Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

I am a little slow in posting these pictures. All of the magnolia blossoms where I live are gone now. There was only one good day to get pictures because of the high winds and the cold front that moved in that evening and destroyed many of the blossoms. Even getting pictures on this particular day was difficult because of the wind. I was only able to salvage about forty pictures from the two hundred or so that I took that day. Enjoy!

Jazz Releases & 2011

I have found the first four months of 2011 to be relatively quiet ones in terms of jazz releases. I regularly check the reviews available online and haven’t been finding too much of note. I am looking forward to hearing Wolfert Brederode Quartet's Post Scriptum and Francois Couturier's Tarkovsky Quartet, both of which will be released later in the summer.

My attention of late has been given toward a few older recordings of current piano trios, some of which have been rotated in my alarm clock and serve as what I hear when first waking up. Maria Kannegaard's Camel Walk, which features Thomas Stronen on percussion and Ole Morten Vagan on bass, received only one or two reviews in this country when it was released in 2008. It is what I have been listening to most often. Initially drawn to that recording because of Thomas Stronen's percussion work, I have since been attracted by Maria Kannegaard's piano, particularly the rhythms maintained by what is presumably her left hand, and the somewhat less prominent bass work by Ole Morten Vagan.

Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal

Lately, I have been finding a lot of pleasure in Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal's Chamber Music, an album in which they combine African and European culture, with Ballake Sissoko playing the kora and Vincent Segal playing the cello. Go to YouTube if you want to hear samples of the music. I found myself often returning to those clips on YouTube and eventually downloaded the album from Amazon.



The kora, or African harp, is a new discovery for me. My first exposure occurred when I was introduced to the music of Rachael Gladwin, who plays kora on Nat Birchall's Guiding Spirit.

Chamber Music is fascinating because of the interplay between the musicians. One instrument often maintains the rhythm initially while the other one plays the lead before the instrument creating the rhythm then takes the lead. Each musician is a virtuoso. This mastery shows. Vincent Segal surprised his audience in the NPR studio when he started plucking the strings of his cello as if he were playing a lute. Although classified as international, aka world music, Chamber Music contains improvisational elements and has been reviewed by some of the jazz websites. The music here is truly beautiful and worth seeking out.