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An honor
I’m enormously grateful to be among four nominees for this year’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Newspaper, Magazine or Online Writing, an honor bestowed annually by the Jazz Journalists Association. My fellow nominees are Nate Chinen, Francis Davis and Mike Zwerin. Thank you, colleagues, for your support.
Roj TV
My good friend and colleague Yigal Schleifer has a piece on page 1 of the Monitor about Roj TV, the Kurdish TV station broadcasting from Denmark.
Deja Vu
Michael Totten has a great post about crossing from Iraqi Kurdistan back into Turkey by car. Brings back memories. We also had to avoid a driver’s scheme to smuggle cigarettes. And it seems that we encountered the same Turkish soldier from Melbourne, Australia. Totten’s post also reminded me of something I forgot to mention in my series — no ATMs
Blaming the artists
My friend Tad Hendrickson has a piece in the May 2006 Jazz Times about major jazz labels signing more and more non-jazz acts. He quotes Ron Goldstein of the Verve Music Group as follows: It’s not that we want to be out of the jazz business. It’s just that there is nothing that is coming along that is exciting. There
Horrible music videos
From opposite sides of the political spectrum, here and here. (Hat tips: David Bloom and The Plank, respectively.)
Support the Euston Manifesto
Go here to read about this new initiative of the democratic left. I’ve signed and sent a brief statement, although I think there’s little to add to this bit by Harry of Harry’s Place: If once the question was are you with the Hungarian or Czech revolutionaries or the Soviet tanks which crush them – now it is about being,
An album appearance
I play acoustic guitar on two tracks (“Wake Up,” “Cupid”) from a really nice album by singer-songwriter Nicholas Naylor-Leyland. It’s called Chocolate Tiger: The End of an Error, and it’s available here.
Tarik Shah article
For those interested in reading my Jazz Times column on Tarik Shah, the jazz bassist accused of conspiring to aid al-Qaeda, you can access it here [pdf]. In the time since I filed the piece, it has come to light that Shah’s trial will not begin until October, and that he will remain in solitary confinement until then. Although I