Dave Holland Track Reviews at Jazz.com

The good folks at Jazz.com have just posted a set of reviews I've written about one of my bass heroes, Dave Holland. The piece is one of their features called The Dozens, in which a reviewer picks twelve tracks that are somehow related and writes a brief essay about each one. Please check out The Dozens: Dave Holland by yours truly.

Oliver Sacks' take on Music and The Brain

Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other wonderful books, has a new book out that has just moved to the top of my reading list. It is entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. This can't be a book report since I haven't read the book yet (although I suppose that doesn't stop some folks from "reviewing"). But the book sounds utterly fantastic.



I just read an engaging review by Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books that really whet my literary appetite. He compares this book to Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, which I have written about here. While Levitin writes about the effects of music on listeners and performers with "normal" brains, Sacks focuses, as usual, on individuals whose neurology is impaired in some way. McGinn's review goes into some detail about the cases Sacks chronicles, but I'm going to wait on being more forthcoming until I've read the book. Next stop: amazon.com.

New Teaching Video

I just created a new video with suggested major triad fingerings for upright bass players:

Check out Jazz.com

There's a new jazz website in town and it is well worth your perusal. Ted Gioia and his colleagues recently launched Jazz.com, a site devoted to evaluations of both historical and contemporary recorded jazz. How they managed to snag that domain name is beyond my ken, but I'm glad it went to a deserving bunch of writers.

So far, Jazz.com has articles about pianists Brad Mehldau and Billy Taylor, interviews with bassist Ron Carter and the founder of ECM Records Manfred Eicher and a variety of other innovative features. One I particularly like is a feature called The Dozens, where a reviewer picks twelve favorite tracks of a particular artist and writes a short squib on each. There's also a blog component which seems to be frequently updated.

It looks like I'm going to do some writing for them as well, so I'm looking forward to that.

Check it out and let me know what you think.