What is the Beautiful?
(Hint: The best things in life are acquired tastes.)

Women are a superior breed to men, but everyone from God to James Thurber knows they sure like to talk. Girl Talk.
I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.

Why does free jazz/Chabad soprano saxophonist Daniel Zamir draw materials from an old Israeli song glorifying a watchman from the 1930s? Why is today’s Israeli jazz a natural, organic expression of early Zionist settlement? Why is Jeff calling a 21-year old drummer a genius? The answer to these and many more questions in Song of The Week.

Desert Island music. Ice also burns.

Pete Christlieb (Steely Dan/Tonight Show ) teams up with the legendary Warne Marsh, 1978. Listen to two tenor saxophonists set the studio on fire.

I can’t think of a single reason why Brazilian/American jazz/bossanova pianist/singer Eliane Elias isn’t a household name – she is a serious musician, outstandingly talented, commercially appealing, and uncommonly pleasing to look at.

You talk about a different drummer? Thelonious Monk inhabited a not-so-parallel universe. He played very few notes, and those unpredictable. Metronomes were witnessed imploding in his presence. He pounded the keyboard with extended, flat fingers. He got up in the middle of a song to dance. He wore funny hats. Sometimes he just refused to talk. But he gave soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy some unforgettable advice about how to be a ‘cool’ musician. Or maybe about How To Be. “A genius is the one most like himself,” Monk says. Clearly, Monk was exactly like Monk.

Loath as I am to resort to gimmickry, it’s hard to ignore the back-story of trumpeter Tom Harrell’s paranoid schizophrenia. He hears voices, maintains ‘a tenuous contact with reality’, is heavily medicated, and speaks like a zombie who’s just seen a ghost. Until he puts his horn to his lips, when he’s instantly and magically possessed by an utterly coherent aesthetic expressiveness.