Louis Danziger cover art for “The Artistry of Bud Powell” 7″
How many products are there that can get sold over and over again and can sometimes even increase in value? I think about that while going through boxes of used records at the Bop Shop. Like millions of other people I sold most of my records when cds came out and then I sold the cds after ripping them. And someone has bought every one of those items a few times over by now.
The 1954 Bud Powell record above used to belong to Douglas Silver who lived in this house in Lakewood California. His address was had written on the back of the 45 I purchased. I love imagining Doug sitting in this house with Bud Powell on his hi-fi. Records have a long life. They live longer than we do. Louis Danziger, the guy who designed this fabulous cover, is 102. Examples of his work are included in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT.
I don’t miss all that vinyl and certainly not the cds but Peggi and I hung on to our forty-fives. And the collection continues to swell, mostly with the addition of jazz titles. I made a playlist of our jazz 45s for Apple and Spotify. Here are the links – Apple Music–Spotify
“One” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 10.05.25
Margaret Explosion plays this Wednesday, December 3rd at the Little Theatre Café. We try to do a different show every time we play. It helps that not all of the five of us can be there most nights. Melissa will not be there on Wednesday so there will be no cello. All five of us were there on October 5 and this song is from our second set. There was a full moon that night and I made this movie as we drove home on East Main after the gig. Peggi was driving. At the intersection of Culver things got a little strange and we went into a dream state. Our friend, Pete, was there and he wrote a poem while he listened. We’ve used his poem in the video.
Peggi Fournier plays soprano sax, Jack Schaefer plays guitar, Mellisa Davies plays cello, Ken Frank plays the big bass and I play the drums. I hope you can stop out on Wednesday. Little Theatre Café 7-9pm
My sister, Amy, and her husband came over for dinner a few nights back and they brought a short stack of fresh vinyl – shrink-wrapped, re-releases and some newly released. We listened to all of one, one side of two others and just one track from a fourth. Not every record works as a setting for conversation and isn’t that really what “over for dinner” means? We need a pretext for conversation.
The next morning I asked Howie” if he could send me a photo of the eight records so we could stream them. He sent this video and I made a playlist of the songs. I couldn’t find the compilation, “When the Rain Turns Into Snow” (I like it when some things just aren’t available to stream). We listened in our living room, in the car and in the kitchen while we separated cardamom seeds from their pods for a recipe.
Andrew Hill “Judgement” on the fabled Blue Note label featuring Bobby Hutchinson on vibes, Richard Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. The way Andrew Hill plays piano he could’ve almost done this date himself. He states the melody, goes on flights of fancy while staying fiercely grounded and carries on a dialog with his own counter-rhythmic, melodic lines. The earthy Elvin Jones and Richard Davis on drums and bass are a perfect compliment and they make this release a masterwork.
Coleman Hawkins “and confreres” (Oscar Peterson Trio and Roy Eldridge) is a curious release. Hawkins horn sounds so rich and the natural reverb they used on it makes it a study in late fifties recording techniques but the bass and drums get lost on some tracks. Almost sounds like they were doing overdubbing back then. The song “Cocktails for Two” transports you and your date to one of those small tables in a smokey, late fifties nightclub .
I had never heard of Muriel Grossmann. Her “Breakthrough” lp is dated 2025 but the opening song, “Already Here,” had me convinced this was something I missed back in the modal jazz heyday of spiritual jazz – Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Pharaoh Sanders etc.
Albums like Jackie McLean’s “One Step Beyond” with Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams are the reason students still study jazz at schools like Eastman. I particularly like the expressive, shape-shifting “Ghost Town” where they slowed things down.
Leroy Vinnegar’s “Leroy Walks Again” reminds you that a band is only as good as their bass player. Known as “The Walker,” he leads his quartet through a solid set of really enjoyable songs. I particularly liked “For Carl.”
Another bass player led disc, Emma Dayhuff’s “Innovation & Lineage: The Chicago Project,” is a live recording with Kahil El’Zabar drums, Dee Alexander on vocals and Isaiah Collier on sax and piano. This is right up my alley, a contemporary version of spiritual jazz. I love this record.
Saxophonist Charlie Mariano’s “Mirror” lp could have only been made in 1972, that cusp when jazz went rock and rock went jazz. Tony Levin plays electric bass, Airto Moreira play percussion and Asha Puthil (from Ornette’s “What Reason Could I Give” and “I’ve Waited All My Life”) sings on the title song. Here is a verse from the back of the lp.
MIRROR Mirror Of your mind Wheels and gears Spinning ’round and ’round Look out for diamonds You don’t need them What for? They can’t help you Find the rainbow’s end Open your third eye
Mona Seghatoleslami is the host of WXXI ‘s Classical 4-7 PM slot. She also hosts the lunchtime concert series at Hochstein. On top of that she books the bans at the Little Café. The WXXI site says “Mona works on any project she can find that helps connect people and music in our community. We asked Mona if she could recommend someone to tune our piano. The piano came from Peggi’s parents and we have only had it tuned once since we moved here. Jaffe, the Colorblind James/Fugs keyboardist took care of that one. Mona recommended Gene Baker, a composer new to the area. Now we are recommending him.
With new life in the upright Peggi has been refreshing her reading skills, concentrating on the left hand, low register parts as she reads. I’ve been listening to her slowly work through the Alec Wilder songbook with enough space between chords to make it sound like Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston.”
We do our share of raking and leaf blowing in the Fall but mostly we process leaves. I run over them with our lawn mower. The mulch sits there all winter as it decomposes. In the summer our lawn looks brown and if we’re lucky I will only have to mow once.
With the yard under control we planned to go downtown but our car wouldn’t start. The computerized dash kept cycling through a long list of things that were amiss. We called AAA thinking we might need a tow. The AAA guy told us even though our battery looked new it needed to be replaced. He jumped it and we headed up to AutoZone. The battery was still under warranty and the cashier, with fake nails an inch and a half long, grabbed a tool kit and the new battery and carried them out to our car. Peggi popped the hood and the cashier installed our battery wearing gloves that allowed her nails to protrude. She tested the new battery and told us we still may have a problem with the alternator. So we drove our car over to B&B Automotive on Saint Paul.
They were super busy, as usual, but said they would take a look. Peggi and started the long walk home. We stopped at Monte Alban for some Mexican food and just as we were finishing Brian called from B&B called to say there was nothing wrong with our car. So we headed back to the shop. I took this picture of a bittersweet bush behind the House of Guitars.
Back home we scooped up two wheelbarrow loads of the leaf mulch from our lawn and took it down to the garden where we scattered it on the garlic bulbs we had just planted. I’m listening to Cal Zone’s show on WAYO as I write this and overjoyed to be hearing Ornette Coleman’s “Trouble in the East” on the radio. The song was recorded live at NYU in 1969. The music critic Martin Williams, who was in the crowd that night, wrote, “It felt spontaneously ordered in all its aspects, and had the timeless joy and melancholy of the blues running through it. It had its feet planted on the earth and it spoke to the gods. It is one of the most exciting, beautiful, and satisfying musical performances I have ever heard.”
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York
There lots of links in the post. Let’s give it up for that guy invented the hyperlink.
I linked to my father’s website in my last post and then poked around the site for a bit. Many of the presentations that he had linked to no longer work in Safari. Some wouldn’t work in Chrome either so Peggi and I tracked down the original Keynote files from 2012 and generated new html pages. We started with the slides from the talk my father gave to the New Jersey Engineering Society in Montclair New Jersey, something my brother, Mark, had arranged. The presentation tracks his engineering work for Kodak and UR. The work he did at the Art Deco Hawkeye plant was top secret.
By chance this morning’s paper had an article about the city securing the site due to increasing criminal activity, Kodak is bankrupt and the current owner, Phoenix Investors, a Milwaukee-based real estate investment firm, acquired the property through a bankruptcy auction after the previous owner, WBS Capital, defaulted and the lender foreclosed.
I worked B trick in Hawkeye one summer as a janitor. We were assigned a route and then found a place to play cards until it was time to punch out. My father was working on a top-secret aerial reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government during the Cold War. The project, known as “Bridgehead” produced lenses and film for cameras that flew over Russia to see where they might have tanks, bombs, munition plants, planes and troops.
While looking for my father’s original files I came across the drawing above that my father sent to my brother, Mark, in 1970 when he was in prison for smoking a joint. I had cracked up, totaled it turn out, the family VW Bug while he was sitting in jail. I wrote about the accident back in 2013. I never saw this drawing above until my brother gave it to me to put in the display case of an art show. I am amazed at how my father was able to visually present a story he heard from me (the accident.) One detail my father left out though was that the guy I hit was a famous mobster’ Sammy G. Gingillo. He was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as sat down in his car parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society downtown. I read a great book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend. Sammy was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he entered his car, which was parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society.
“The Christian Warrior” (St. Paul) Butler, Pike Stained Glass Studios 1921 Third Presbyterian Church Rochester, NY
Historic Brighton presented their annual “Leo Dodd Heritage Preservation Award” today to Valerie O’Hara of Pike Stained Glass Studios. My father, Leo, was the first president of Historic Brighton and my sister, Amy, is the current president and she presented the award at the Third Presbyterian Church, a site selected by the recipient as Valerie and her stained glass company did so much work here in the last century.
People all around us were checking the score of the Bills game. I was studying the six windows directly across from where we were sitting, a series that was given to the church in memory of five young parishioners who died in World War I. The six windows featured five saints, Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Paul, Saint Gabriel and Saint Martin de Tours. One is an angel and one an archangel, very handy in battle. Paul is depicted twice, once as a Christian Warrior wearing the armor of God and next to it he lays his armor down representing peace after battle. He holds a shield with an oak tree, the scales of justice, and the dove of peace along with the shields of the U.S. Army Engineering and Medical Department.
At the foot of each saint is one sixth of a quote from Timothy, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.” Interestingly, each panel also includes insignias of the US allies in the great war, a wacky combination of religion, warfare and politics.
Walking along Trott Lake the other day I was thinking, if Frankenstein was filmed here this would be a good location for monster to throw the little girl into the lake. We had just watched Guillermo del Toro’s version. We were disappointed by the first half and could only make it through an hour and a half. The generated sets felt overblown, the interplay overwrought and it was hard to feel anything for the characters. But on the second night, starting with the section, told from the monster’s viewpoint, we got comfortable. We watched the 1931 version with Boris Karloff the next night and loved it! Peggi has two versions of Mary Shelley’s book and started reading it that night.
The following night we watched Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version. We had seen that when it came out and it has not improved with age. I found Branagh too much of a dandy in the role of Victor and as a director he didn’t help De Niro portray the monster by having him mouth what should have been portrayed in storytelling through film. I suspect he would have been more comfortable portraying the whole thing as a love story, he in the lead.
In a review of the new version the New Yorker’s Justin Chang referenced Víctor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) as “the stealthiest of all Frankenstein films.” And when we learned it was set in Spain we added it to last night’s Criterion calendar. We were blown away by this one! Set during Franco’s reign in a remote village on the Castilian plateau it was astoundingly beautiful. The 1931 Frankenstein film was shown in their community building. We see just a few scenes through a young girl’s eyes and a magical, poetic story unfolds in her head.
I picked up a copy of the Alice Coltrane book, “Monument Eternal,” at the show devoted to her at LA’s Hammer Museum. I read some of it while we out there and then some over the summer on our porch. It is a short book but I rarely plow straight through anything. Her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, says Alice was “one of the first people to move outside the mainstream, one of the first female, Black, American jazz musicians to record her own music in her own studio and release it on her own terms.” Alice was from Detroit so I’m loving all the references to clubs in the city. She spent time playing with fellow Motor City musicians Donald Byrd and then Terry Gibbs. Here is a passage from page 127.
“She was particularly at home in minor keys, especially improvising on tunes with slow harmonic motion – much of the music she recorded during her career as a bandleader, such as “Ptah the El Daoud” or “Journey in Satchidanda” were tunes of this nature. On Gibbs “Jewish Melodies in Jazztime,” we can see that her improvisations were already headed in this direction. We can also begin to understand why John Coltrane may have been attracted to her playing. Gibbs recounted how Alice actually “stole the date” from him: She was starting to play runs she got from listening to John and all the musicians flipped out every time she played. She was making those Eastern-style runs on minor songs and they sounded very authentic. I was the Jew, and she was wiping me out. (2003)”
The temperature dropped into the mid twenties last night and ushered in our first snow. And when the thermometer rose above 32 this morning all the leaves dropped from our red maple. At the same time the witch hazel in our backyard is in full bloom. We just picked a batch of Padrón peppers yesterday but I’ll bet the plants have shriveled up today. The kale and collards can handle it and the Mache lettuce seems to love this weather. We will pick another batch of that over the weekend when temperature climbs back into the fifties.
Sam Fratto oil on wood painting “Embark” at 420 Anderson Alley
My brother, Fran, was eating lunch when we stopped by on Friday, lasagna that he had warmed on the stovetop. It looked so good we decided to go out for Italian that night. Nearby Pasta Villa was the obvious first choice. Since they don’t take reservations we made a point to be there at 5. The bar was full and there was a forty minute wait in the dining room. We called Lucano’s on East Avenue and got in there.
The night was still young. We stopped at Studio 402 for Sam Fratto‘s show of Arcadia paintings based on photos he took in the Adirondacks. I use the word “Arcadia” as in an idealized wilderness, a utopian place of unspoiled nature, harmony, and simple life. Like the retreats Kirchner and his fellow Brücke artists would take at the lakes outside Dresden where they bathed and created artworks depicting each other in relaxed harmony with nature. I’m hoping this genre comes back.
Karen Sardisko diptych at Colleen Buzzard’s
Next stop was next door at at Colleen Buzzard’s for Karen Sardisko‘s show, “Paintings and Re-Imagined Monoprints.” I really loved this one on the big wall. Diptych’s are tricky. The two halves have to talk to one another. Getting one painting to work is hard enough. Getting two paintings to work with each other and have whole efficacious is a real trick. ( I almost said “kick ass” in that last sentence but settled on the synonym, “efficacious”)
Peggi and Cynthia Howk from the Landmark Society exchanged emails this week on one of those rabbit hole digs. They were trying to track down where in our neighborhood the architect, Robert Brodie, once lived. Peggi found an article on Newspapers.com about a Mrs. Brodie taking children from Hillside Children’s Center on horseback rides from her house on Hoffman Road. A photo accompanied the story and Peggi was able to determine which house it was although the house was greatly altered by local artist, Sabra Richards. The percussion teacher at the Eastman School lives there now. Cynthia was arranging a tour of one of Brodie’s houses on Lake Road and she invited us to tag along.
The swing bridge is open at the mouth of the bay so we were there in minutes. The current owner is the son of the original owner and the mid-century modern home has thankfully not been altered, only improved. Cynthia pointed out the clearstory windows that run along the top of the house, a new architectural term for us. Some of the interesting features include a soundproofed telephone booth. A light goes on when you sit down and there is a hardwired intercom to the house next door for setting up carpools when both families included Kodak employees. The entire model home darkroom displayed in the Kodak exhibit building at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in Flushing is installed in the basement. And a feature that you might have to be an electrician to appreciate. Each of the six single-bulb lights in the hallway were modified to accommodate two light bulbs wired in series, not parallel. So all but two or three of the twelve original bulbs, now 73 years old, are still in service.
The owner learned we play music and he showed us his Hammond B3 he had in the basement. He told us a story about the brakes on his mom’s Metropolitan going out as she came down the driveway. Rather than slam into the house she quickly decided to run the car into a nearby maple tree.
Lake Road house number two
Since we’re out this way we stopped in to visit my brother and on the way back we pulled over to admire this house along the lake. We got out to take a photo. The owner was out front and Peggi told her we were architectural buffs. She invited us in and we learned this house too designed by Robert Brodie. See Peggi’s Don Hershey website for more local mid-century showpieces.
I’m guessing the owners of this sign are finally letting go of that missing Covid year. “Party Accordingly” is good advice any time. On Wednesday we’re celebrating the full moon at the Little Theatre Café. Melissa has gig in Syracuse with her primary band, Wren Cove, so we’ll play without her cello. Peggi and I fell into “It Ain’t Necessarily So” last night so we might try that one with the group. Jack will be there with his bass clarinet and guitar. That is always a treat.
Last month’s first set felt all off to Peggi and me but the second set was magic. Here is song number 11 of the 14 song we did that night.
“Full Moon” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 10.08.25. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Jack Schaefer – guitar, Melissa Davies – cello, Paul Dodd – drums.
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It was cold, windy and rainy on Halloween so we didn’t have a single trick or treater. We were ready. I bought a sixteen dollar bag of mini Snickers, M&Ms and Twixt candies at Walgreen that afternoon. The candy was already 25% off.
Today, All Saints Day, is a day of obligation for Catholics. I have a tiny twinge of longing for those rituals.
One of the rewards of getting old is that the obituaries are more interesting. So many people we grew up with are getting the back page send offs these days. Jack DeJohnette, who drove Miles’ band in the “Live Evil” stage, played with Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Keith Jarrett and passed. We saw him with a trio out at Red Creek in the seventies and then in a duo setting with Bobby McFerrin at the Jazz Fest. I loved his playing.
The O’Jays’ bassist, Anthony Jackson, left us. I had never heard his name before but learned he invented the six string bass (two too many, I would say) and he was known for the iconic bass line on their song “For the Love of Money.” We have the forty-five and played the intro over and over after reading about it. Because we never watched the Apprentice we didn’t know it was the theme song. I hope Jackson lived a comfortable life with the proceeds.
We don’t get Fox so we can’t watch the Blue Jays beat LA in the World Series and none of our three La Liga teams had matches this week so by Wednesday we were jonesing for some action. We tuned into a Copa del Ray match between Real Sociedad and Negreira. Real Sociedad, from San Sebastian, is a top team in the Primera Division and Negreira is an amateur team in Spain’s sixth division. There are plenty of lopsided matches when the Copa del Rey gets going. Every team in Spain is eligable. We had walked through the village of Negreira when we did Camino de Santiago and we were in San Sebastian to see Chilida’s museum. Most of Negreira’s players had worked regular jobs that day and they were expected to peter out fast but despite the 3-0 scoreline they gave the pros a real run for their money.
We took advantage of Wednesday’s warm sunny weather to chew up some leaves and move a stack of firewood closer to the house. We have an electric leaf blower, not as loud as a gas-powered one but loud enough for ear protection so we each put our Home Depot noise canceling headphones on. Peggi blew the leaves from the driveway and patio onto the lawn and I prepared to chew them up with our mower, a “mulcher” with two blades, but the pull cord broke on my first tug. A couple of Youtube how-tos later I had it successfully rewound. I only mowed the lawn once this year. We have so many trees our ground cover is just scattered weeds and chewed up leaves from years past.
I don’t like listening to neighbors mowing but I like mowing myself. We used to go to my grandmothers’ on the weekends and my father had me mow her lawn while he helped her around the house. My family had a yellow push mower and because that was something I had to do I remember not enjoying the experience. In Bloomington I mowed lawns for the University. They owned rental houses all over town. I had a near religious experience on that job when a woman leaned out her window and called me over to hand me pairs of her dead husband’s socks. I left the office in the morning with my gas powered mower, mowed like a madman, hid my machine in the bushes and rode home to the trailer to hang out until quitting time. I bought my first when Peggi and I moved into a rental house together.. It was a Sears special – 100 bucks! When we moved here I mowed our rental and three or four of the surrounding neighbors’ lawns. Like Pete LaBonne, “I Mow the Lawn.”
While filing away some records I came across a sleeve with a stamp on it from a record store on Genesee Street. When Duane lived up here we used to haunt the reggae shops on the west side, his old neighborhood. Their primary business was selling weed under the counter but they advertised themselves as record shops and they had Jamaican imports and a sound system to back up the claim, big dirty, bottom heavy sound systems. They displayed their wares like the photo above except this one was taken in Duane’s office/media/spare bedroom in 1999 after he had moved to Brooklyn. It took me a bit to find the photo as it was tucked away in a folder called “DC210Photos, my first megapixel camera, a Kodak DC 210.
We were talking to Dick Storms at Brian Williams’ bash and I asked, how come you don’t have a Jazz 45 section over there. He was taken aback and acted surprised, saying, are you sure? He said he knew they had boxes of them in a closet in the back room. So many that he began fantasizing about filling the juke box in the back room with jazz 45s. I have spent quite a few hours in that closet now I have only come up with Duke Ellington’s “Indian Summer” and a wacky version of Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris” by the Ventures. Rochester’s Gerry Niewood plays sax on that one. Not complaining. I realize how old world my quest has become.
Autumn is wrapped in melancholy. We haven’t put on our storms but we’ve already had a few fires. We’re watching a little more tv too. Criterion had a Scorsese thing going and we had just finished “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” when along comes the Apple documentary on him. Each episode is so jam packed we could only do one a day.
Jumping from the kid who seemed so real in “Alice” to the kid in Netflix’s “Adolescence” illustrates how times have changed. The series is fabulous until the very end where the dad tries to explain himself. Adolescence looked even more brilliant coming after “Black Rabbit” which had every reason to be good but instead felt empty. A big budget, big actors and directors (Jude Law, Jason Bateman, Laura Linney) and a dramatic thriller of a story but no soul. They manufactured an intense pace with quick cuts and twist while Adolescence got real with hardly any cuts.
Noah, Melissa,Andrew, Ben and Patrick at Wren Cove Record Release Party at Red White and Brew
We first heard Wren Cove when we shared a gig at Joy Gallery on West Main. They played first and we asked Melissa to sit in with us for our slot. That was three years ago and we’ve heard them many times since. If they don’t have a gig the same night as us Melissa has become a regular in our band.
For a duo Wren Cove provides an incredibly wide pallette of dreamy soundscapes. Andrew’s almost incessant strumming (I am partial to that quality in my own playing) is the foundation of the duo and Melissa’s cello is the “lead singer” as Andrew himself says.
Writing for City, Patrick Hoskin drops astute references to Arthur Russell and Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in his review of the duo’s new cd, “Movement.” Wren Cove built many of the tracks on their new record around the ancient drum machines shown in the photo above. We have one of them, a Rythmn Ace. It still works even though we’ve jammed it a few times pushing two buttons at once for “Mambo/Slow Rock” or “Samba/Beguine.”. Wren Cove pushes stretches this idea further by manipulating the sound of the drum machine and then having real drummers play on top. This widens the picture frame and can sound like parts stumbling in different directions which only makes it a more compelling listen.
Songs like “Raga in Dm,”Wills,” “Everything We Carry” and especially “Nocturne” with Andrew’s gorgeous piano just sweep us away.
Like one half of the city, we went to another “No Kings” rally yesterday, this one along the river downtown. It was a beautiful day to be out but there were so many issues to address. In 1969 it was just one. It can overwhelm you and make you feel like we have not made any progress. The anti-progressive movement is formidable. Despite the overwhelming number of issues, most people seemed to be having a good time.
