LATEST ADDITIONS

The first time I recall hearing a vibraphone was on a record at E.J. Korvette's. I was perusing the vinyl back in 1960 something or other when the store clerk put on a copy of Terry Gibb's That Swing Thing (Verve V6-8447), cuing up Bobby Timmon's catchy as the flu "Moanin'" which this clueless suburban adolescent had never heard.

Who engineered The Searchers tunes? \"Mystery\" solved!

This Memphis Slim record is special because it was an impromptu session, occurring at the end of his first “scripted” Candid date. As the tunes rolled out, it became clear to producer Nat Hentoff that Memphis’s playlist was comprised of “Traveling Music.” The blues great suggested the album title. I learned all of this from the liner notes.

Maybe it's the fact that it's early Saturday morning and I've just woken up on the couch with an endless sea of empty beer bottles in front of me on the coffee table that's got me to thinking. I mean, it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time: drink as many beers as I possibly could in one night while listening to Tanglewood Numbers repeatedly in an attempt to get into the notoriously alcohol-soaked mind space of leader David Berman. After all, I'm always up for a scientifically based experiment, and considering I was using one of the great thinkers of our time, Neil Young, as my model, I figured nothing could go wrong.