fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
{Ed. note: Much of the biographical information in this article is supported by Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu (North Point Press, 1996).} By the time the Duke Ellington Orchestra went on their first State Department-sponsored tour, which yielded The Far East Suite, long-time Ellington co-composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn was already a…
In 1956, during the halcyon days of the Cold War and immediately after the McCarthy era, the US State Department began an interesting experiment. Take some of America’s top jazz talent and put them on tour to spread goodwill and music to the people’s of the world. They selected Dizzy Gillespie, a showman’s showman, to…
My mom used to say of Mozart that one can like only a third of Mozart’s music and still like a lot of Mozart. Very true. In his short 30 years of composing he wrote a staggering number of pieces. The Köchel catalog of Mozart’s work, which has been revised many times to accommodate newly discovered…
In the masthead for the gar spot you’ll see the bottom part of my tabla sitting just above the keyboard. This is the instrument I actually ended up studying, and continue to study after over a quarter century. But my first Indian instrument, the first instrument I ever studied seriously, was the sitar. I had two…
In the numbing haze in which I found myself on that fateful day in June 1996 when Mom died, I managed to focus while packing for the trip to L.A. to join my family on that which was most important: Music. In those pre-MP3, pre-iPod days, I carted about a dozen or so CDs with…
You’ve changed That sparkle in your eyes is gone Your smile is just a careless yawn You’re breaking my heart You’ve changed One of the last songs Billie Holiday recorded, accompanied by strings, horns, and an angelic female chorus singing high soprano, a delicate arrangement that only enhanced the delicate state of her voice. Her…
