Wordless Wednesday: Celebrating Bee Balm

Jazz on Tuesdays--- Irving Berlin

One of the last portraits from our DC trip, which we took a year ago which has not made it on to my flickr site, will get there later today.

7 for the weekend--- RIJF Day 3 + 4 = 7 full sets

It was time to bring my amazing analytical skills out of the closet, I mean was I not the man who scored better than 99% of those taking the GRE back in the late 80's. Day one we got to town a bit late so that explained the 2.3 hours/sets. Day two was more like 2.67 hours/sets. So there I was with Friday's schedule as we wound down in bed after Thursday's jazz.

And I nailed it! Four full sets on Friday (consider this: we saw four hours of jazz within a five hour time frame!!!!!) and Saturday we saw three full sets, the three we most wanted to see.

Disappointing: The sax player was grounded in NYC because of monster thunderstorms, but the Italian bass player we saw on Wednesday grabbed hold of a young trumpet dude and created a great show, though we had hoped to see Mirko Guerrini...

Then it was the band that had me highly excited, the bass player, Dan Berglund, from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio (or E.S.T.) had his new band in the US for the first time and we were there. Tonbruket where we first heard steel guitar played in a jazz band.
Then to see a pianist, who the program said had been compared to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans, Andrew McCormack and Jason Yarde (sax) played beautiful duets (and inspired a CD purchase). I loved their originals, and their take on Gershwin's Embraceable You was a highlight of the festival.

Watch them talk about being a duo and listen to them play ...
And why not have a second batch of Nordic Jazz for the evening, though it would be our last for the festival. In The Country, a trio of dudes (the vibes player in the video was not with them) who took up running to be in shape to go on tours...


A leisurely and tasty dinner led to us missing the earliest of shows. The night started with solo guitar work by Martin Taylor, who was hoot between tunes and showed why his students flock to see him play standards and his originals, like this one: True, which became the theme to a Japanese TV show about poets boxing each other.

When we saw that jazz composer/conductor Dave Rivello had been taught by Bob Brookmeyer and that Maria Schneider liked his music, well we were there to see him conduct his 11 piece band and left with a CD in hand.


We left the amazing jazz orchestra to hear 38 Special blaring one of their big hits at a free concert (no rant about them playing at a jazz festival, since we had plenty of jazz to see and lots of folk were having fun in the street) and quickly ducked into the closest jazz venue, which is where we wanted to go any which way. And in the same setting where we ended the festival two years ago, we saw the full set of Ben Allison, yet another bass player, as he led his trio which included a trumpet and guitar. and that is that!

Rochester Jazz Day 2: a duet, a trio, a quintet

well, first I stood inside a really big stump.

But eventually we made it downtown again. We started with UK jazz with the Episcopalians (the photo is from a past year when a backdrop did not cover the Tiffany Mosaic.) and with light fading through stained glass...




... we listened to a duet: Fraser Fyfield and Graeme Stephen play tunes like this...

The Trio for the evening was Nordic: Ounaskari-Mikkonen-Jorgenson with the Lutherans.




and for the quintet, that was in the home of xerox, where Dave Young paid tribute to Oscar Peterson. Here he is playing bass with Oscar in 2007:

Wordless Wednesday: standing inside a tree

Rochester Jazz Day 1

Plan: leave work, drive, buy pie, drive, say hello with pie, listen to jazz.

So we headed to that fortress of God and Nordic Jazz known as Reformation Lutheran Church and found a long line of people hoping to see Sinne Eeg. A quick check saw that the church was packed and the line was filled with people with more hope than I could muster after 7 hours on the road.

So we walked about a bit aimlessly but ended up singing Down By The Riverside with the three trombonists of Bonerama. And so with a disappointment came great joy.

The next 10 acts would be from various countries outside of the US, and not just Canada like the second act for the evening.

While most of the bands would be doing original music, Brienn Perry was celebrating the great American songbook with his voice and alto-trombone (yes there is such a thing, and yes it was a grand night for the tronmbone)



It was at this point in the evening I realized I had lost our Wednesday evening cheat sheet or maybe we would have ended up seeing Emilie Claire Barlow but instead we headed to see some Italian jazz: LaBarbera-Occhipinti Quartet. What I remember most is an Ellington tune that I had never heard of, but that is what it is all about for us, why stand in line for hours to see the person/band we have heard of playing in Kilbourne Hall when all kinds of new jazz awaits us.. So we would pass up seeing Grace Kelly, Bill Frissel, Kenny Barron, and Regina Carter. Maybe it helped that we had seen all but Grace Kelly, and she is so young there is a good chance that day will come. Here is Roberto Occhipinti and his nonet.

thoughts on the scraps of faithfulness

This morning I had breakfast under this Blue Dolphin with a flickr friend, who I had never seen or talked to before, but two people who watch each others lives unfold in photos, do get to know each other. Check out her photos.


I had featured some of the projects I had made from left-overs of spelling out Faithfulness on flickr. My friend asked about my use of "scraps" of faithfulness. I agreed with her that scraps is a strange word that brings up positive and negative images. What exactly are the scraps of faithfulness? So I was thinking about it and a Bible passage came to mind.

Matthew 15 from The Message:

^21-22From there Jesus took a trip to Tyre and Sidon. They had hardly arrived when a Canaanite woman came down from the hills and pleaded, "Mercy, Master, Son of David! My daughter is cruelly afflicted by an evil spirit."

²³Jesus ignored her. The disciples came and complained, "Now she's bothering us. Would you please take care of her? She's driving us crazy."

²⁴Jesus refused, telling them, "I've got my hands full dealing with the lost sheep of Israel."

²⁵Then the woman came back to Jesus, went to her knees, and begged. "Master, help me."

²⁶He said, "It's not right to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to dogs."

²⁷She was quick: "You're right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master's table."

²⁸Jesus gave in. "Oh, woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get!" Right then her daughter became well.

So maybe my scrap projects are for those of us who will put God to the test. To stretch the limits of God's love to even us, who don't really deserve it, but if we ask and id we refuse to accept anything but love, we can see the healing power of God.

welcome sign

mandala

and doodle

...

7 from the back garden

Buddha hanging out with the pink roses




The very dark buterfly bush is about to bloom (basketball hoop is neighbors)




the big addition is this lilac




edible leaves




Astilbe!




my woven trellis for the tomatoes, which will be added to in due time. also of note are the beans, eggplants, peppers and also the irises given to me by a friend this spring.



Yarrow!

10 images--- Today in the Front Yard

I have spent more time in my garden so far this summer than I did all of last year, so let me show it off.

A GARDEN TOUR for my friend

these ferns are quite happy in the shade between our house and the neighbors house



The Dianthus did its pink explosion, so let me highlight how it is trying to climb down to the front sidewalk.


The white lavender is exploding.


these pincushions were one of the first perennials we planted, they keep coming back.


inbetween the dark dark iris and the white Bleeding Heart (both had wonderful spring blooms) is a bronze coleus just for Mosaic Woman who fell in love with them at Longwood Gardens.


The Dancing Ladies just barely came back this year, but they did come back.



we even have hanging baskets.



the rock garden has covered the rocks, but that's OK. They did a wonderful series of blooms this year.


this Hydrangea has been given lots of love since we moved in, including a move away from the house so the rain actually hits it now.


we have a few types of coneflowers which are just coming into their own


and that is the front yard.

Vlog: doodling with Kurt Elling

Most of the time my doodles evolve into designs, which are used to make suncatchers, but at other times I cut out pieces of glass that are in my favorite shape. Then I make a design, this is what I call doodling with glass. The video will help you see the process and then see what grout does to make the mosaic complete.

The music is a tune from Kurt Elling: The Gate. He is singing a Joe Jackson tune. I used to really love Joe's music when I was in my early 20's. enjoy...

Wordless Wednesday: art from dried plants

by Conrad Stoltz

by Yoko Nakayama

Jazz on Tuesdays--- Miles Davis his trumpet and his music

Nearly a year ago we spent time in 100 degree heat running about Washington DC. I knew that one day I would place it at the the top of a blog post and below it would go...

Update: Fruits of the Spirit: Kin

Last night I took on another of the fruits. When I told Mosaic Woman that I had gotten the first three letters cut out, she suggested we translate the Greek as Kin, not Kindness. Earlier in the day we had worked on getting the 12 letters of faithfulness glued down onto a four foot piece of hardibacker.

She had just started working her magic about those orange letters...



Today she got a bit farther...



as did I...

Vlog: Red with Billy Child's Wheelbarrow

Red Wheelbarrows are important:

Driving up I-95 in fall 2007, while on tour, I was struck by the stark beauty of the New England autumn - the red, orange, gold, green, and yellow leaves of the tress rushing by the car window, the small clearings, the little pathways. It brought to mind the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow and I knew that this project would be an impressionistic depiction of what I'd experienced on that drive. I wanted to capture, not just a sense of autumn but also the movement of autumn - wind blowing leaves as they spiral through the air in little eddies, the drumming of the rain as it hits the brown earth, the stillness of a lonely red wheelbarrow in the middle of an open meadow. Billy Childs

The poem that came to Billy Childs, is a poem on my classroom wall:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams

a new Dr Ed Mandala on Wordless Wednesday

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