In the late 1980s it felt as if the world was sorting itself out. The Berlin wall came down in 1989, and Nelson Mandela was released after 21 years in 1990. Mandela turned 90 this past week, so here is Stevie Wonder’s pretty gospel song “Free” of 1987 in a video that seems to be [...]
Michelle Obama is very good at the difficult political wife routine – she sounds about as grounded and real as you can sound if you have to be everything to everybody.
“The blues is the healer”, sang John Lee Hooker. Well, jazz witch Cassandra Wilson casts a healing spell in “Death Letter” – a powerful womanly take on Son House’s raw blues classic. It’s about hearing that the man/woman you love is dead and being faced with the dead body and the funeral. Listen to that [...]
Aimee Mann delivers deadpan songs with intelligent irony on “@#%&! Smilers”. She takes a dim view of our materialistic world: “You got a lot of money, but you can’t afford the freeway.” Bouncy, in a downbeat sort of way. Listen:
Another one bites the dust. Comedian George Carlin (May 12, 1937- June 22, 2008) was a very funny guy who hated bigotry. The first host of Saturday Night Live, he said, “I think it is the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” Noone understood better [...]
You women out there, do you ever wonder why you play second fiddle to the men at work? Maybe, like me, you tend to break one of the unwritten codes of male business behavior.
Oh, for a Friday night out listening to the blues sung with real class! Catherine Russell grew up in New York in a musical family (her father collaborated with Louis Armstrong, her mother is a singer, too) and has been a backup vocalist for big pop and jazz acts for years. But she’s got her [...]
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