The premise behind this blog is a pretty simple one: I write about music I like, and I do it not from the perspective of a professional jazz musician or scholar, but rather that of a more or less regular guy who happens to love listening to, and writing about, music. Specifically, jazz music.
That is the same premise that made my weekly radio show, “Saturday Night Jazz,” a success on KMHD for eight and a half years.*
No pretentions, no bullshit.
As I write these words, the time in Wood Village, Oregon is 6:45 PM, and for the last several hours I have been sitting here, listening to album after album, trying to make up my mind who I want to write about this week.
Well, actually, that’s not totally true. Years ago, “Blues Palace” host Tom Addis and I had a discussion about how we found songs to play on our shows, and we discovered we both used the same method: We would listen to the first 30 seconds or so of one likely song after another until we found the right one.
That is what I’ve been doing all afternoon, with the exception that we’re talking here about whole albums, not just individual songs. On several of the songs that I did listen to, I listened to more than the first 30 seconds, but the basic process is still pretty much the same.
After a while, frankly, it can get pretty damn boring.
So early in the afternoon I said to heck with this. I grabbed my camera and went for a walk so I could get out of the house for a while. Weather-wise, it’s been a nice day today, and if the weatherman is right we probably aren’t going to see weather like this again until next July. (This is Oregon, after all.)
When I returned, I resumed the parade of CD’s through the external player I have attached to my laptop. Disk after disk started out seeming that perhaps it was going to be the one I could write about. Disk after disk petered out, if you’ll excuse the expression, after a few tracks.
Then I took another short break at about 5:30 and wound up falling asleep in my recliner downstairs in the living room. If a friend hadn’t called an hour later, I would probably still be asleep in that chair right now. (Thanks, Greg!)
The result of all this is, it’s now nearly 7:30 PM here on the west coast, and I still have no album to write about. Instead, I’ve given you 600+ words on the effects of writer’s block.
Boring, I know. But hey, life goes on and I hope I’ll see you back here next Saturday. I figure if I start looking right now, and if I’m really lucky, I just might find an album to write about by then.
Thanks for reading this. I hope you have a great week.
Al Evans
Wood Village, Oregon
*PS: I don’t like to brag, but there is an old saying that goes something like this: If you don’t blow your own horn, then who will? The fact is, until “Saturday Night Jazz” came along, Saturday nights on KMHD were a dead zone, ratings-wise, except for Art Abrams’ extremely popular “Jukebox Saturday Night.” I worked hard to build my show into a success for KMHD because I cared about the station and, most of all, I cared about the music. I like to think that showed.
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Jazzforasaturdaynight.com contains only the jazz CD reviews I’ve written since May 2013. To see the complete index of all 73 reviews I wrote prior to that time, click here.
If you see an album that looks interesting, just click on the title and you will be taken to my review of that album on blogspot.com.
Copyright © 2013 by Al Evans. All rights reserved.
jazz for a saturday night 