SST Blog

8/6/18   “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—That’s what our country was founded on, and not coincidentally is at the center of my existence. I’m doing my best to prolong my life, stay out of prison and sustain the government that guarantees me these two rights. But the pursuit of happiness; what is that?   I recently read an article that posited that pursuing happiness leads to depression since we always fall short. First of all, we don’t always fall short. If you look at happiness as a temporary or fleeting feeling, I’ve certainly attained that many times over...

When things are going right, drummers and bass players are natural allies. When I started playing the bass in Boston in 1954, a well developed rhythm section culture was already in place. You could hear bassist, John Neves, and drummer, Jimmy Zitano, every night at the Jazz Workshop at The Stables. They were solid and dependable models. Even when I had been playing for only a few months, John would invite me to sit in with the quintet, and I’d get the chance to experience playing with a first class drummer. Jimmy Zitano was a fine player — one among...

7/15/18   I didn’t make that up—Faulkner did, so I’ve got to give it some thought. I was just reading a movie review about a teenage coming-of-age story starring Elsie Something-or-other. I always thought that my Aunt Elsie’s name was so old- fashioned, but I suppose everything comes back into style eventually.   And then, out of the blue, my daughter texted me that she just took my granddaughters out to buy them malteds in honor of my aunt. When my daughter was little, I told her the story about how when I was five or six years old, and...

7/5/18   I had a tennis lesson this morning at 7 o’clock. I put on my shorts and one of my old Essentially Ellington tee shirts with a caricature of Duke in a top hat across my chest. While walking home up Broadway after the lesson, a middle-aged Black man hanging out on the sidewalk asked me if that was Duke Ellington. When I told him that it indeed was, he smiled and said, “Take the ‘A’ Train.” I might be easy to please, but that made me feel really good.   It’s been 44 years since the Maestro died....

  6/28/18   The tragedy of dying young is that you don’t get to outlive your relevance. The tragedy of old age is that you do. A friend of mine posted on Facebook that he was feeling down because he didn’t receive any votes in this year’s Downbeat Critics Poll, so he went out and bought a pair of fabulous sneakers. Being a fantastic saxophonist who is well known to musicians, he got more than a few loving responses.   My response was that in my 50-year professional career, I got exactly one vote in that same poll, 45 years...