Category: Music

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Morning Tunes

Hott City – Ain’t Love Grand (1979)

This album—although never a commercial success (and as far as I know, the group’s only release)—holds a very special place in my heart. One of the few pieces of vinyl to survive my expensively-stupid great purge in the late 80s, I still have the original white vinyl copy that Steve Golden gave me all those many, many years ago.

Needless to say, it was quite a treat to stumble across the CD in 2024.

Don’t judge me.

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Morning Coffee With Ella

Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook (1997 reissue)

I know I’ve featured this album before in another context, but fuck it. This is my blog and I’ll do what I want.

Love is Love and all that, indeed, but so many of Cole Porter’s songs take on an additional, personal—color—when you consider he was a gay man who—if only subconsciously—wrote these songs as if they were being sung to another man.

He lived a very interesting life.

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Saturday Evening Soundtrack

Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1970)

I love Miles Davis, but I’m still trying very hard to like and appreciate this one. I put on Miles to relax, and Bitches Brew is anything but relaxing.

I have several suggestions both from here and Reddit on which way to go from here in regard to exploring the Miles Davis catalog, but it seems my CD budget is always getting pulled in some other direction. (Most recently I have the soundtrack to Sweet Charity on order.)

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Afternoon Dance Party

Disco Discharge – European Connection (2010)

I had never heard this track before (weird, I know, right?) but I absolutely love it. It plays me.

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The Beginning Of A Mellow Afternoon

Joey Alexander – Warna  (2019)

And believe me, it’s needed.

I took Sophie in for her annual shots this morning.

“Dad! I do NOT like this! Can we please go home?”

She was such a good girl however, that we stopped for a pup cup on the way home.

Prior to leaving this morning, I was about to do my usual breakfast routine, but discovered I was out of the Kate Farms solution (haven’t received my monthly supply from the healthcare distributor and my most recent order from Amazon hadn’t arrived yet), so I combined my iced coffee with two cartons of isosource. All was well and good until right before I left for the vet and the most horrific reflux hit. Apparently I overdid it on the volume and my stomach didn’t like it one bit.

The worst part of not being able to swallow is when you get reflux. If everything were functioning properly, I’d whip up a glass of baking soda solution, swallow it, and  everything would be right as rain. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option. Yeah, I can still do the baking soda solution via the g-tube (after using the tube to drain the excess stomach contents) to quiet my stomach, but there’s no way of immediately relieving the burn left in my throat from the reflux. And of course there was a certain amount of aspiration, so my O2 (after being 98-100% for weeks now) took a—thankfully brief—nosedive to under 90%. It’s since recovered  to the mid 90s, but damn…it wiped me out and I wanted nothing more upon returning home than to take a nap.

That’s passed now, but it’s still going to be a very low-key, quiet afternoon and Joey Alexander is a perfect accompaniment for that.

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Evening Tunes

Peter Erskine – Transition (1987)

I originally bought this disc in 1987—for obvious reasons—long before I had gotten into jazz. Despite the bear on the cover, after a few listenings, I just couldn’t get into it and ended it selling/trading it at Streetlight Records on Market Street. Nearly 40 years years later I ran across it again and wondered if my musical taste in general or appreciation for more freeform jazz had changed any.

It had. It’s that one disc I always pull out when I can’t decide what to listen to. But to be honest there is still one track on the album that I consistently skip over if the remote is handy.

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